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President Donald Trump speaks following a meeting on infrastructure at Trump Tower, August 15, 2017 in New York City.
- President Donald Trump reportedly demanded more information about the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), a cloud contract from the Pentagon that could be worth as much as $10 billion.
- Right now, the bidding for the JEDI award has narrowed down to finalists Microsoft and Amazon Web Services - with AWS widely considered the favorite to win.
- Oracle, which was eliminated from the bidding process, recently lost a key legal battle in which it argued that the JEDI deal unfairly favored Amazon.
- Some Republicans, including Florida Senator Marco Rubio, had written letters to the White House and military leaders echoing Oracle's concerns.
- Trump reportedly said he is interested in looking into the contract bid's circumstances, but he did not say if he would block it from being awarded to either Microsoft or AWS.
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President Donald Trump has demanded more information about a $10 billion cloud contract from the Pentagon that will be awarded to either Microsoft or Amazon, Bloomberg reported.
Trump reportedly did not say whether he would take the unprecedented move of intervening and block the contract from being awarded to either Microsoft or Amazon, the two remaining companies in the race. However, Bloomberg cites a person familiar with a call between Trump and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) who said that it sounds like the president is thinking about canceling the deal.
This contract, known as Joint
Google dropped out of the race in October, and IBM and Oracle got knocked out of the bid in April. Now, it's down to Amazon and Microsoft - with Amazon and its market-leading Amazon Web Services platform widely expected to win.
Bloomberg reports that Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) wrote a letter to the Pentagon expressing concerns over the contract, and spoke to Trump about the matter. Sen. Rubio, meanwhile, went so far as to write a letter to National Security Advisor John Bolton, asking him to delay the awarding of the contract entirely over concerns that there wasn't enough competition. Rubio spoke to Trump about his concerns, Bloomberg reports.
The letters in question expressed concerns that the terms of the JEDI deal made it so that some companies, including Oracle, could not win the bid. Trump reportedly asked his aides to show him these letters, and expressed frustration that he didn't know about these concerns earlier.
Previously, Oracle filed a lawsuit challenging the Pentagon's bidding process, saying that "JEDI is riddled with improprieties," and "[Amazon Web Services] made undisclosed employment and bonus offers to at least two DoD (Dept. of Defense) JEDI officials."
In June, the Pentagon denied these legal allegations and defended its decision to narrow down the race to Microsoft and Amazon.
"Oracle is not in the same class as Microsoft and AWS when it comes to providing commercial IaaS and PaaS cloud services on a broad scale," the filing said, referring to two key cloud technology offerings - "infrastructure as a service" and "platform as a service."
On July 12, a federal judge ruled against Oracle's protest about the bid process favoring AWS. Federal claims judge Eric Bruggink rejected Oracle's arguments, saying "individual conflicts of interest did not impact the procurement."
In April, Trump reportedly dined with Oracle CEO Safra Catz, who was part of his presidential transition team in 2016, during a time when Oracle was still in the JEDI race. The White House did not disclose what was discussed at the meeting, although Trump has been openly critical of Amazon. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is also the owner of the Washington Post, which has published news coverage critical of President Trump and his administration.
Oracle declined to comment. Business Insider has reached out to the Department of Defense, the White House, Amazon, and Microsoft for comment, and will update if we hear back.
