AWS files rare bid protest over Google's West Point award

Here is something you don’t see every day: Amazon Web Services has filed a bid protest over a contract won by Google.

The company is objecting to West Point specifying the use of Google’s GSuite Enterprise for a task order it awarded under the Army ACCENT basic ordering agreement. The value apparently is below $25 million.

I’ve seen Amazon on the other side of this equation -- a competitor such as Microsoft objecting to an agency specifying the use of Amazon. In one case, the agency withdrew the solicitation. And in another, Microsoft withdrew its protest.

The only other AWS protest I could find was from early 2015 when they protested another solicitation that specified the use VMware for cloud services. That protest was withdrawn a month later probably because the solicitation was pulled back.

And of course, AWS was the target of IBM’s unsuccessful protest of the CIA cloud contract win in 2013.

But it shows shows how much the market has changed in recent years when you have the likes of Google and AWS squaring off over an Army contract.