Amazon Files Suit Against Pentagon For Awarding $10 Billion Cloud Computing Deal To Microsoft 

Rattled by the US government's decision to award prestigious $10 billion Pentagon Cloud project to Microsoft, retail giant Amazon's Cloud arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) has filed a lawsuit challenging the Department of Defence's move.

AWS lost the JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) contract on 25 October that will provide enterprise level, commercial Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) to support Department of Defence business and mission operations.

US President Donald Trump, who has been a critic of Amazon and Bezos over the company's tax arrangements, even got involved during the bidding process, saying the government was looking at the contract after "getting enormous complaints" from the competitors.

AWS filed the lawsuit with the Court of Federal Claims on Friday (22 November).

The Complaint and related filings contain source selection sensitive information, as well as AWS's proprietary information, trade secrets, and confidential financial information, the public release of which would cause either party severe competitive harm," Amazon said in its court filing.

The record in this bid protest likely will contain similarly sensitive information.

In August, the Pentagon said it was putting the JEDI contract on hold after US President Donald Trump complained about potential conflicts of interest in the process.

Bezos has often been targeted by the US President because of his ownership of The Washington Post and the views of the paper against the Republicans.

The Pentagon selected Microsoft and AWS as the two finalists for its $10 billion Cloud contract, as earlier contenders Oracle and IBM missed the bus.

US Defense Secretary Mark Esper, however, recently rejected any notion of bias in a decision to award Microsoft the JEDI contract.

"I am confident it was conducted freely and fairly, without any type of outside influence," he told a news conference in Seoul.

(This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.)