The history of the JEDI contract is interesting[2018]. It was contested by Oracle and also by IBM, and was widely seen as a last-gasp attempt by two entrenched

The history of the JEDI contract is interesting[2018]. It was contested by Oracle and also by IBM, and was widely seen as a last-gasp attempt by two entrenched 'enterprise tech' vendors to remain relevant in the cloud marketplace. But as [2018] notes, Oracle complained. > In the complaint, Oracle dives into deep detail about two DOD officials whom it alleges had ties to Amazon Web Services, the cloud company thought to be in the frontrunning for JEDI. Oracle believes those two officials influenced the JEDI strategy to be tailor-fit for an AWS win. The interesting thing here is that both Oracle and IBM had an initial strategy of painting the JEDI requirements as exceeding DOD's needs, an interesting tactic given their relative lack of scale -- they are in capex terms also-rans in the cloud market. After a review, in April 2019, the Pentagon said that the employee's actions did not affect the process and further ruled IBM and Oracle out of the process[2019], while retaining Amazon's and Microsoft's bids. Microsoft was finally awarded the contract in late October, which prompted Amazon to claim "political influence" because of Trump's statements re the contract, and led to a further legal challenge[2020]. [2018] https://www.fedscoop.com/ibms-protest-10b-jedi-cloud-contract-dismissed/ https://www.fedscoop.com/ibms-protest-10b-jedi-cloud-contrac... [2019] https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/12/after-two-years-jedi-finally-underway/162005/ https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/12/after-two-y... [2020] https://tech.newstatesman.com/cloud/amazon-pentagon-contract-appeal-us-judge https://tech.newstatesman.com/cloud/amazon-pentagon-contract...