Oracle loses challenge to $10 billion US govt contract

Oracle Corp. lost its legal challenge to the Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud contract on Friday, clearing the way for the government to award the contract to Amazon.com Inc. or Microsoft Corp. Federal Claims Court Senior Judge Eric Bruggink dismissed the company’s argument that the contract violates federal procurement laws and is unfairly tainted by conflicts of interests. Bruggink said that because Oracle didn’t meet the criteria for the bid, it “cannot demonstrate prejudice as a result of other possible errors in the procurement process.” The decision is a major blow to Oracle, which risks losing a share of its federal defense business if the Pentagon awards the contract to another cloud company. “They stand to lose the most ground in the Defense market if the DOD decides JEDI is the end-all be-all.” Oracle looks forward to “working with the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and other public sector agencies to deploy modern, secure hyperscale cloud solutions that meet their needs,” company spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger said in a statement. Elissa Smith, a Defense Department spokeswoman, said in a statement that the ruling “reaffirms the DOD’s position: the JEDI Cloud procurement process has been conducted as a fair, full and open competition, which the contracting officer and her team executed in compliance with the law.” Amazon Web Services, which was also a defendant in the case, said in a statement that the company “stands ready to support and serve what’s most important – the DoD’s mission of protecting the security of our country.” JEDI Project The project, known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud - or JEDI, an acronym intended to evoke “Star Wars” imagery - is intended to be the Defense Department’s general-purpose cloud for most of its systems and applications.