Amazon Web Services Inc. is stepping up its protest of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract award, asking the U.S. Department of Defense for more clarity around corrective action it has proposed taking.

The company filed a second, concurrent bid protest directly with the DOD Monday, though it hasn’t been made public yet. The protest comes after a federal court judge’s decision to grant the DOD a 120-day remand to “reconsider the aspects of the procurement challenged in Amazon’s protest of the JEDI contract.”

The DOD awarded the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project to Microsoft Corp. ahead of AWS in October following a hotly contested bidding process that saw earlier bids from IBM Corp. and Oracle Corp. also lose out. The JEDI contract, which has a value of $10 billion over 10 years, was expected to be awarded to AWS until very late in the process.

AWS protested the award in the Court of Federal Claims in December, before winning a temporary restraining order in March that prevented the DOD and Microsoft from building out the JEDI cloud infrastructure. That came after the court ruled that AWS was likely to show that the DOD erred in its technical evaluation of Microsoft’s bid.

Now, a spokesperson for AWS says the DOD has amended the JEDI solicitation for a key part of the contract that deals with pricing scenarios for online cloud storage. The amendment came after the Court of Federal Claims ruled that the DOD’s evaluation of this factor did not comply with the contract’s requirements, and means both AWS and Microsoft can submit revised proposals.

But AWS says the amended language in the contract is “ambiguous.” Its protest comes after the Pentagon denied Amazon’s “repeated efforts” to get more information on the nature of the updates, AWS said. It says the ambiguity could lead to a lack of common understanding and an “apples to oranges price evaluation” for the companies.

“AWS is committed to ensuring it receives a fair and objective review on an award decision that the Court found to be flawed,” AWS’s spokesperson said in a statement. “AWS repeatedly sought clarity from the DoD around ambiguous aspects of the amended solicitation and the DoD refused to answer our questions. We simply want to ensure a common understanding of the DoD’s requirements and eliminate ambiguity that could impact a fair evaluation.”

Microsoft responded to the latest protest today with a blog post penned by Corporate Vice President of Communications Frank X. Shaw, who said AWS was purposefully blocking the company’s work with the DOD on JEDI.

“This latest filing – filed with the DOD this time – is another example of Amazon trying to bog down JEDI in complaints, litigation and other delays designed to force a do-over to rescue its failed bid,” Shaw wrote. “And now Amazon is at it again, trying to grind this process to a halt, keeping vital technology from the men and women in uniform — the very people Amazon says it supports.”

Shaw added that Microsoft isn’t aware of the exact content of Amazon’s new protest because the complaint was filed “out of view of the public and directly with the DOD.”

He added that Amazon’s latest move is “disappointing, but not surprising.”

A spokesperson for AWS later responded to Shaw’s blog post, saying it’s not surprising that Microsoft is trying to posture again. “But anybody who’s studied the cloud computing space will tell you that AWS has a much more functional, capable, cost-effective and operationally strong offering,” the spokesperson added.

Amazon said the factor the DOD has amended in its JEDI solicitation is just one of many that it objected to in its original bid protest with the Court of Federal Claims. The spokesperson said the company hopes to see all of those factors addressed.

“We’re eager to see the full array of mistakes considered and assessed,” the spokesperson said.

Photo: tpsdave/Pixabay