In a shocker to Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and his Cloud arm Amazon Web Services (AWS), the US government has awarded the much-anticipated $10 billion Cloud contract for Pentagon to Microsoft.
Known as the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI), the Cloud contract 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, the Department of Defence said in a statement.
The expected completion date of the project is October 24, 2029.
The Pentagon selected Microsoft and AWS, cloud computing arm of Amazon, as two finalists for its $10 billion cloud contract, as the earlier contender Oracle missed the bus.
The JEDI Cloud computing contract is aimed to bring the entire military under the envelope of a single Cloud provider.
Over the last two years, the Department of Defence has awarded more than $11 billion across 10 separate cloud contracts.
The base contract period is two years with a $1 million guarantee.
"The National Defence Strategy dictates that we must improve the speed and effectiveness with which we develop and deploy modernised technical capabilities to our women and men in uniform," said DOD Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy.
"The DOD Digital Modernisation Strategy was created to support this imperative. This award is an important step in the execution of the Digital Modernisation Strategy."
Succumbing to pressure from employees, Google last year dropped its bid to be part of the JEDI contract.
It's a key contract for Microsoft as the company battles Amazon for cloud dominance, reports The Verge.
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 competitors to Amazon and Microsoft.
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)