In a recently closed lawsuit, Amazon blames an “extraordinary environment of corruption, interference and retaliation” by President Donald Trump and his administration for improperly influencing what the company claims is an otherwise inexplicable decision by the US Department of Defense to create a $ 10 to be awarded. billion cloud computing project to its rival Microsoft.
Microsoft quickly fired back, accusing Amazon of sour grapes in its ongoing protest against the award of the Pentagon contract. The Redmond company said in a statement that it is “time we went ahead and get this technology into the hands of those who urgently need it: the women and men who protect our nation.”
The statements of the Seattle area tech giants further escalated a yearlong war of words over the coveted government contract.
Before Microsoft secured the deal in October 2019, Amazon was seen as a precursor to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) agreement, a massive project to move the Pentagon’s computing infrastructure and data to the cloud. That migration is awaiting Amazon’s appeal. It’s not yet clear how things could change, if at all, under President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming administration.
Amazon’s 175-page amended complaint, originally filed under seal Oct. 23, was made public with editorial staff Tuesday afternoon. The complaint concerns new flaws in the court-ordered re-evaluation of the contract bids, which led the Pentagon to reaffirm in September that Microsoft was the winner of the contract. Amazon says the re-evaluation is “rife with errors even greater than those plaguing the first award” of the contract to Microsoft last year.
For example, Amazon Web Services says that a change in the Pentagon’s requirements, intended to correct a previous government error, allowed AWS to lower the price of its own proposal – removing a price advantage Microsoft had gained based on what AWS calls the Redmond company “Non-compliant engineering approach.”
“The emergence of AWS as the cheapest provider made DoD’s attempts to send the contract to Microsoft complicated,” Amazon’s complaint said. “Faced with the unsustainable combination of Microsoft’s technical inferiority and the now higher price, DoD manipulated its evaluations to an extent that contradicts any facade of rationality.”
The complaint cites President Trump’s repeated public statements attacking Amazon and saying his hostility to the company inappropriately influenced the procurement process, citing it as “one of many dangerous examples of elevating the president’s personal interests. above the national interest “.
In this “environment of corrupt pressure,” Amazon says procurement officials face retaliation, including possible job losses if they award the contract to Amazon.
“That environment has intensified in the months since it was first awarded, in conjunction with DoD’s increasingly irrational mistakes in its attempt to appease the commander-in-chief and reassign JEDI to Microsoft,” he says. “The inexplicable flaws and errors necessary to support reallocation to Microsoft can only be understood in the context of President Trump’s continued violations of the laws, regulations and standards designed to protect the lawful and impartial functioning of the government. to protect.”
Microsoft pointed to a report by the Department of Defense Inspector General in April which found that Department of Defense officials were “ not pressured over their decision to award the contract by senior DoD leaders who may have communicated with the White House. “
Amazon has pointed out that the White House was exercising presidential privilege and instructed several Defense Department witnesses not to answer inquiries from investigators.
“Amazon seems to say the only way they can ever lose is if the tender isn’t fair,” Frank Shaw, a Microsoft Corporate Vice President, said in a statement from the company. “But every month the market tells them that’s not true. Large and advanced customers regularly choose Microsoft over AWS. They do this because of the power of our technology, our understanding of complex projects, and our overall value. “
Amazon and Microsoft and other cloud vendors regularly release news stories touting customer wins in an effort to show momentum. During his recent keynote at the company’s re: Invent conference, Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, showed statistics that put AWS’s share of the cloud infrastructure market at 45%, more than double Microsoft Azure, the largest competitor.
In its own statement Tuesday, Amazon said the price change cited in its amended complaint lowered its offer by tens of millions of dollars.
“The fact that correcting just one error can move the needle essentially shows why it is important for the DoD to resolve all evaluation errors that are not addressed, and ensure they have access to the best technology at the best price” , the AWS statement says in part. “We had made it clear that unless the DoD addressed all the flaws in its original decision, we would continue to pursue a fair and objective assessment, which is exactly where we are today.”
In its complaint, Amazon asks the U.S. Court of Federal Claims to declare the award of the contract to Microsoft inappropriate, order the Pentagon to recruit and re-evaluate new proposals, and the Pentagon team responsible for the selection.