Pentagon’s JEDI contract, down to Amazon or Microsoft, now slated for a decision in late August

Kareem Anderson

About two months ago, it had been reported that the Department of Defense has whittled down the number of applicant partners it was going to use for its accelerated transition to the cloud, down to two.

More commonly known as the JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) contract, the Department of Defense has shopped the hosting of its unclassified, classified, secret and top secret data to a bevy of technology companies, but in the end it seems it has come down to the US government choosing between Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft’s Azure cloud service provisions.

More recent news has now narrowed down the time frame for when the DoD, and the Pentagon in specific, will make its decision as to which company will be awarded the 10 billion dollar cloud contract.

According to a brief from Seeking Alpha who puts Pentagon’s CIO Dana Deasy on record, both Amazon and Microsoft will be made aware of the winner by late August of 2019, despite a pending a court case from Oracle who was also in the running.

Oracle’s pending case could put a monkey wrench in Amazon’s plan for victory as it centers on both a prior conflict of interest as well as unfair competition practices claimed by Oracle.

Despite Oracle’s claim and pending court case, Microsoft was able to edge out competition from the likes of IBM, Facebook, and even Google, to make as one of two top contenders.