Extra time for JEDI redo
The Defense Department requested an extension to a stay in a lawsuit before announcing any revisions to the award in the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud deal.
The U.S. government has requested a one-month extension before announcing any revisions to the award in the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud deal, according to court documents.
DOD had been set to announce an updated award decision on Aug. 17, and a senior agency official affirmed as recently as July 30 that the Pentagon was on schedule to do just that.
The new deadline is Sept. 16, according to court documents. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft did not object to the extension.
The Defense Department is still collecting material from Microsoft, which won the original contract last October, and from AWS, which is protesting the award in court.
The AWS lawsuit over the DOD's flagship cloud contract covered a variety of issues, including the possibility of White House interference in the final award. However, the case has been on pause under a stay since April 17 to deal with a set of technical issues surrounding the pricing of data storage.
A new amendment permitted AWS and Microsoft to revise their proposals. That led to an agency-level protest by AWS that erupted into public view in May with a series of dueling blog posts from vendors. However, the back and forth on the revised request for proposal was not concluded then. According to the Aug. 10 filing, "DoD has recently identified the need to reopen limited discussions related to certain aspects of the offerors' pricing proposals."
After a final round of questions from vendors, the filing states, the Pentagon is expecting final proposal revisions from the two vendors by Aug. 12. After that, there are internal processes at DOD including a new source selection decision and a peer review before vendors and the public are notified of any revisions to the original October 2019 award.