DOD asks court for more time to make new JEDI award
By
Ross Wilkers
Defense Department attorneys have asked the U.S. Court of Federal Claims for a 30-day extension on its deadline to make a new award decision on the massive JEDI cloud infrastructure contract that Microsoft and Amazon Web Services are battling over.
The Defense Department has asked a federal judge for a 30-day extension to continue the ongoing partial re-examination of the JEDI cloud infrastructure contract’s award to Microsoft.
In its court filing Monday, DOD said it wants a new deadline of Sept. 16 instead of the prior Aug. 17 date to decide whether to stick with Microsoft or switch the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure award to Amazon Web Services.
Attorneys representing DOD told the Court of Federal Claims that it needs to reopen some discussions regarding the pricing aspects of both companies’ proposals. Neither legal team representing Microsoft or AWS oppose DOD’s motion requesting more time to work on this second try at an award.
The department’s filing indicates the companies have submitted revised proposals as DOD has issued more than one solicitation amendment, which has in turn resulted in more rounds of proposal revisions and exchanges between DOD and bidders.
But DOD has told the court it has “recently identified the need to reopen limited discussions related to certain aspects of the offerors’ pricing proposals.”
Microsoft and AWS will get the opportunity to ask more questions and work on proposal revisions, which DOD expects to get the final versions of by Wednesday. That would put DOD on a schedule of completing the re-evaluation process by early September.
This latest ask of the court comes less than two weeks after DOD Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy told a group of defense reporters, including that of our sister publication FCW, that he expected a decision on JEDI by the end of August.
JEDI was supposed to start being fielded two years ago but has been protested four times, including this round by AWS.
DOD’s other high-profile commercial cloud buy for Microsoft Office 365-based collaboration tools has also been tied up in protests. The department and General Services Administration are working on a corrective action for the Defense Enterprise Office Solutions contract after an accidental disclosure of pricing information.