A judge of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims turned down motions by the Department of Defense and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) to dismiss Amazon’s (Nasdaq: AMZN) lawsuit challenging the award of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud computing contract, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith’s decision means that litigation over the JEDI cloud contract will continue.
Amazon Web Services said it is pleased with the decision and that it “continues to be the superior technical choice, the less expensive choice, and would provide the best value to the DoD and the American taxpayer.”
Frank Shaw, a communications executive at Microsoft, called the decision a procedural ruling.
“Not once, but twice, professional procurement staff at the DoD chose Microsoft after a thorough review,“ Shaw said. ”We’ve continued for more than a year to do the internal work necessary to move forward on JEDI quickly, and we continue to work with DoD, as we have for more than 40 years, on mission critical initiatives.”
In October 2019, DOD awarded the JEDI cloud contract to Microsoft but Amazon filed a federal suit in Washington a month later to challenge the Pentagon’s decision.
The federal judge ordered the Pentagon to stop work on the JEDI contract in early 2020 and then moved to approve the department’s remand request to reassess the award decision.
In September, the Pentagon reaffirmed its decision to award the JEDI contract to Microsoft.
