Amazon Web Services Inc. won a small victory in its ongoing legal fight to block the U.S. Department of Defense’s decision to award the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract to rival Microsoft Corp. when a judge today declined to dismiss its protest lawsuit.

The JEDI contract, which could be worth up to $10 billion over the next 10 years, remains in limbo as U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith issued a sealed decision that prevents Microsoft and the DOD from getting work underway on the contract.

Under the JEDI contract, Microsoft is supposed to provide the DOD with cloud computing infrastructure and services that are designed to modernize its information technology systems.

The U.S. Pentagon surprisingly awarded the contract to Microsoft in October 2019 following a long procurement process, though Amazon was widely expected to win. Amazon immediately protested the DOD’s decision, and its legal challenges have stalled work on the contract ever since.

Amazon’s protest centers on two main claims — first, that the DOD “consistently and repeatedly made prejudicial errors” at every step of the procurement process “that systematically favored Microsoft,” and second, that this occurred because of “improper influence” from former President Donald Trump.

The DOD’s and Microsoft’s motion to dismiss Amazon’s protest apparently focused on the second complaint but failed to convince the judge to drop it.

“The record of improper influence by former President Trump is disturbing, and we are pleased the Court will review the remarkable impact it had on the JEDI contract award,” said an Amazon Web Services spokesperson. “AWS continues to be the superior technical choice, the less expensive choice, and would provide the best value to the DoD and the American taxpayer. We continue to look forward to the Court’s review of the many material flaws in the DoD’s evaluation, and we remain absolutely committed to ensuring that the Department has access to the best technology at the best price.”

Today’s decision means the case will rumble on, but Microsoft said in a statement that it changes little.

“Not once, but twice, professional procurement staff at the DOD chose Microsoft after a thorough review,” said Microsoft Head of Communications Frank Shaw. “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.”

Analyst Charles King of Pund-IT Inc. told SiliconANGLE that today’s ruling suggests there’s more than enough meat on the bones of Amazon’s claims to let a judge and jury sort them out. “That’s generally bad news for Microsoft but even worse for the DOD, especially if evidence exists that shows the agency willingly or unwillingly succumbed to pressure from the Trump White House,” King said.

However, the legal wrangling has made the DOD impatient, and today’s ruling means there’s a very real chance it may decide to abandon the JEDI contract altogether in favor of a new procurement process.

FedScoop reported in January that the DOD sent an “information paper” to Congress explaining that if the Court of Federal Claims rejects its motion to dismiss Amazon’s lawsuit, that could “elongate the timeline significantly,” forcing it to reassess its strategy entirely.

“Regardless of the JEDI Cloud litigation outcome, the Department continues to have an urgent, unmet requirement for enterprise-wide, commercial cloud services for all three classification levels that also works at the tactical edge, on scale,” DOD Chief Information Office John Sherman told FedScoop in January. “We remain fully committed to meeting this requirement — we hope through JEDI — but this requirement transcends any one procurement, and we will be prepared to ensure it is met one way or another.”

King said that abandoning the JEDI project and restarting the procurement process could provide some cover for those involved in the decision to award the contract to Microsoft. “It also makes sense from a technological perspective since the the IT industry, vendors and the cloud marketplace have all changed substantially since JEDI was a mere Baby Yoda proposal,” he added.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said the ongoing delays were likely hurting the DOD and having a negative impact on its systems, purchasing and costs planning. He said he too would welcome a decision to abandon JEDI.

“The DOD’s original request for proposal was done with an outdated criteria to award the JEDI contract to a single infrastructure as a service provider,” Mueller said. “We have known for many years now that the best practice for mission-critical operations is a multicloud deployment. So it would benefit U.S. taxpayers if the DOD issues a new request for proposal and then makes a decision to select the top three cloud vendors and quickly gets the U.S. military started with the cloud.”

Photo: Wiyre Media/Flickr