Judge: Amazon ‘likely to succeed’ on key issue in Pentagon lawsuit
A federal judge said in court documents that Amazon’s protest lawsuit over rival Microsoft being awarded a highly lucrative defense project was “likely to succeed on the merits” of one of its main arguments, The Washington Post reported.
In October, Microsoft was awarded the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud computing contract after the Trump administration and other lawmakers intervened on the tech giant’s behalf.
The document provides some insight into how U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith might rule on the case. To the chagrin of Microsoft and the Department of Defense, Campbell-Smith last month halted production on the JEDI cloud system, saying in her decision that the Pentagon erred in how it evaluated prices for competing proposals from the two tech companies.
In a statement to the Post, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Robert Carver said, “We remain focused on getting this critical capability into the hands of our warfighters as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
In a similar vein, a Microsoft spokesperson downplayed the ongoing court proceedings.
“The decision disagreed with a lone technical finding by the Department of Defense about data storage under the evaluation of one sub-element of one price scenario,” company spokesman Frank Shaw told the paper in a statement.
“While important, there were six pricing scenarios, each with multiple sub-elements, and eight technical factors, each with numerous subfactors evaluated during the procurement,” he added. “The decision does not find error in the Department of Defense’s evaluation in any other area of the complex and thorough process that resulted in the award of the contract to Microsoft.”
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