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MICROSOFT, AMAZON MAY STILL COME OUT ON TOP AFTER PROJECT JEDI’S DEATH
- By The Financial District
- Jul 8, 2021
- 2 min read
Microsoft suffered a seemingly serious blow to its future earnings earlier in the week. when the Department of Defense (DoD) announced that it is killing off its controversial Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud-computing project. But it's not the end for Microsoft's connected defense ambitions, Yahoo Finance technology editor Daniel Howley reported.
The initiative was expected to drag the DoD’s computing platforms into the 21st century by consolidating them into a single entity. The idea was to ensure everyone from DoD employees in the US to soldiers on the frontline could access and manipulate data and support innovations in artificial intelligence at the speed of modern enterprises.
Microsoft initially won the contract in 2019, giving its cloud platform, the second largest in the world, a massive win over market leader Amazon. But the deal was fraught with issues including accusations of interference by then-President Donald Trump — who expresses disdain for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — and worries about a single company controlling the government’s entire cloud platform.
It’s not all doom and gloom for Microsoft, though. The company now has the option to bid on JEDI’s replacement, the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability initiative (JWCC), a multi-cloud project that could see Microsoft and Amazon win the contract together.
In a statement announcing the end of JEDI, the DoD more or less lays out that Microsoft and Amazon are still its top contenders for the JWCC contract. “The Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) will be a multi-cloud/multi-vendor Indefinite Delivery-Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract,” the statement reads.
“The Department intends to seek proposals from a limited number of sources, namely the Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) and Amazon Web Services (AWS), as available market research indicates that these two vendors are the only Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) capable of meeting the Department’s requirements.”
