The Department of Defense (DoD) and JEDI contract story refuses to die as DoD has asked for a one-month extension to review the JEDI deal. This comes just a few days before the initial date (August 17) that the deal was supposed to be finalized. We have already covered the JEDI deal in extensive detail, but these are the recent developments.
The DoD is currently reviewing new revised plans for its joint corporate security infrastructure agreement. The JEDI deal was awarded to Microsoft Corporation in October 2019 over Amazon Web Services Inc.’s competitive effort. Amazon, widely regarded as a favourite to win the deal, in turn, filed a lawsuit against the federal government. The Seattle cloud giant stated that US President Donald Trump’s animosity toward the company affected the outcome of the contest.
The JEDI deal continues to be delayed in the procurement process. Last year, the initial award results were delayed by several months as Oracle had put up a strong pre-award protest. The courts had also issued a temporary restraining order on any work on the JEDI deal earlier this year and the work on the JEDI was further delayed. The courts had stated that AWS was “likely to succeed” in proving that the DoD was incorrect in the evaluation process.
The request, made in the Federal Claims Court, is another delay to the controversial JEDI deal. The DoD was to finalize the contract by August 17 after a 120-day delay to take proper action on the contract. It is now asking that the decision be postponed to September 16.
The court filing said, “during the remand, DOD has identified areas of concern with respect to the revised proposals received from both offerors, resulting in multiple solicitation amendments, rounds of proposal revisions, and exchanges with the offerors. In evaluating each offeror’s final proposal revisions, however, DOD has recently identified the need to reopen limited discussions related to certain aspects of the offerors’ pricing proposals.”
The aforementioned lawsuit from Amazon has also been put on hold as the two bids are now under review by DoD. As the current situation stands, the two companies will have another opportunity to submit questions and a revised bid. The Pentagon has said the review process will end in early September. With the uncharacteristic delays that the JEDI deal has already witnessed, one can only hope that the Pentagon finally makes a decision on the extensive cloud contract award.