According to an announcement on the official website of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Microsoft launched a bid protest against the U.S. Department of Defense's National Security Agency (NSA) on July 21.

The lawsuit originated from an open tender by the National Security Agency (NSA). According to reports from multiple industry media, the contract, code-named "Wild and Stormy," aims to use the Hybrid Compute Initiative of "hardware as a service" and "volume pricing cloud computing" toModernize and upgrade the core confidential database that stores large amounts of intelligence information.

In this bidding, the NSA put this secret cloud computing contract worth $10 billion.Awarded to Microsoft Azure’s old rival – Amazon AWS.

Two weeks after receiving the notification of losing the bid, Microsoft filed a bid protest with the GAO. According to the GAO official website,The NSA needs to respond by October 29.

In fact, bidding lawsuits between cloud computing companies are common for U.S. government orders.

AWS beats IBM and wins $600 million CIA order

In 2013, a rather tortuous tug-of-war over cloud computing broke out between AWS and IBM.

 January 2013The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) announced that AWS has won a 10-year, $600 million contract from the CIA to provide cloud services to the CIA and NSA;

 February 2013IBM, another bidding company, protested to the GAO against the CIA's decision, arguing that the CIA had insufficient knowledge of the bidding companies' past performance and that there were problems with the price calculation;

 June 2013GAO supports IBM's bid protest and urges the CIA to correct its bidding and evaluate IBM and AWS bids equally in its bidding pricing plan;

 July 24, 2013AWS challenged the CIA's new approach at the request of the GAO as "worthless" and "outdated," and took the government to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims;

 July 25, 2013The IBM legal team immediately applied to the court to intervene in the ongoing litigation between AWS and the government and respond to the questions raised by AWS;

 August 16, 2013Based on GAO's recommendations, CIA conducted pre-trial negotiations with AWS and IBM before the trial, but the mediation was unsuccessful;

 August 20, 2013When the lawsuit went to trial, the CIA believed that the AWS solution was technically superior, and therefore chose AWS over IBM, which offered a lower price;

In early October 2013,The U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled to withdraw IBM's bidding lawsuit and support the contract order between AWS and the CIA;

IBM then filed a motion in court to try to stop the cooperation process between AWS and the CIA.

The government showed IBM relevant documents and stressed that delays in cooperation could threaten national security. IBM withdrew its motion.

At this point, the eight-month bidding lawsuit initiated by IBM finally ended with AWS' victory.

This is also a major victory for AWS in the bidding for US government cloud orders.

The CIA has always been known for its extremely high requirements for data security. Winning the $600 million CIA order provides strong credit endorsement for AWS to develop other government customers.

It took two years to ruin Azure's cooperation with the Pentagon

In October 2019, Microsoft Azure defeated Amazon AWS, "generally considered the most likely winner in the industry", and won the order for the US Pentagon's Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project (JEDI).

The order is for a period of 10 years and the project value is as high as 10 billion US dollars.Used to build a cloud computing platform to support military weapon systems and confidential data storage.

 November 2019Amazon filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, submitting 265 doubts about the order and arguing that the Pentagon's decision contained obvious flaws, errors and biases.

In Amazon's view, then-US President Trump was dissatisfied with the Washington Post's criticism of him.It implicated Amazon and Bezos (Bezos is a major shareholder of The Washington Post), which in turn affected the Department of Defense's bidding.

 January 2020AWS asked the court to prevent Microsoft from starting work on the contract until the case is concluded;

 February 13, 2020The Court of Federal Claims halted progress on the JEDI order, finding AWS’s protest valid;

 April 15, 2020The Pentagon's inspector general released a 313-page investigative report stating that the order was not influenced by the White House;

September 4, 2020After re-evaluation, the Pentagon still decided to award the $10 billion JEDI order to Microsoft Azure;

 October 23, 2020AWS has again protested the Pentagon's latest decision, demanding the revocation of the Pentagon's decision to award the JEDI order to Microsoft;

 February 23, 2021Microsoft President Brad Smith called for expediting the handling of bidding lawsuits and resuming the JEDI order process as soon as possible;

 April 28, 2021The U.S. Court of Federal Claims rejected the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Microsoft’s motions in favor of Amazon AWS’ bid protest against the JEDI order;

 July 6, 2021The U.S. Department of Defense clearly stated thatAs needs continue to change, cloud computing conversations increase, and the industry evolves, the JEDI cloud computing contract cannot keep up with demand.", therefore decided to cancel the $10 billion JEDI cloud computing contract that Microsoft won in October 2019 and replace it with a new multi-vendor contract (Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability), and release this procurement contract in the form of multi-cloud, multi-vendor cooperation.

At this point, Microsoft Azure, the fat duck that was cooked, could not escape the mission of "flying away" after two years of fierce operations by AWS.

No Prize Guessing: Who Will Win the NSA's Billion-Dollar Contract? 

In this light, it is not difficult to understand Microsoft's resentment about Amazon AWS winning the bid for the NSA's $10 billion order. It seems like an eye-for-an-eye move.

In order to win more lucrative federal government orders, AWS, a veteran in government public relations, has hired a large number of former government officials.

According to an analysis report released by POLITICO.com, AWS has hired at least 66 former government officials with experience in mergers and acquisitions, procurement or technology adoption since 2018, most of whom were hired directly from government positions.More than half are from the Department of Defense, with a large number of employees coming from the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs.

These employees' government backgrounds and networks are of great value to AWS in winning large government contracts.

No specific details have been made public regarding the bidding lawsuit Microsoft filed against the GAO, and the final ownership of the NSA's $10 billion order is also full of variables.

Can AWS, the cloud giant, win again this time? How long will the bidding and litigation between the two giants last?

What do you think about this?

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refer to:

https://fcw.com/articles/2013/08/06/ibm-response-amazon-court.aspx

https://www.zdnet.com/article/pentagon-terminates-controversial-10-billion-jedi-cloud-contract-with-microsoft/

https://www.agileit.com/news/jedi-awarded-government-contractors/

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