The Pentagon is seeking an additional 30 days to take corrective actions and announce a new award for its potential $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract, according to court documents.
The department is currently facing a deadline to issue a decision next week, but has filed a motion in federal court to push that back to Sept. 16 to “reopen limited discussions related to certain aspects of the offerors’ pricing proposals.”
“The extension is a result of unanticipated events that delayed the DoD’s completion of the activities outlined in the Court of Federal Claims’ Voluntary Remand Order,” Russell Goemaere, a DoD spokesman, told Defense Daily.
Microsoft [MSFT] originally won the JEDI cloud contract last October, while Amazon Web Services [AMZN] , the other finalist, has mounted a legal challenge over the competition
A federal court in April granted the Pentagon’s motion to remand AWS’ lawsuit allowing the department to review technical aspects of the contracting process and reevaluate proposals for the program (Defense Daily, April 17).
Both Microsoft and AWS did not object to the Pentagon’s call for an extension, according to court documents.
“During the remand, DoD has identified areas of concern with respect to the revised proposals received from both offerors, resulting in multiple solicitation amendments, rounds of proposal revisions, and exchanges with the offerors,” lawyers wrote in the department’s motion.
DoD CIO Dana Deasy told reporters at the end of last month the Pentagon was aiming to announce a re-award decision for JEDI by the end of August following the court-ordered reevaluation period (Defense Daily, July 30).