JEDI acquisition challenged in Court of Federal Claims

After losing out in a Government Accountability Office bid protest, Oracle is taking its case against the Pentagon's proposed $10 billion, 10-year cloud infrastructure deal to federal court.

Oracle is suing in the Court of Federal Claims. The case was filed under seal on Dec. 6 and a judge has not been assigned so a docket report is not available for review online.

"The technology industry is innovating around next generation cloud at an unprecedented pace and JEDI as currently envisioned virtually assures DOD will be locked into legacy cloud for a decade or more," said Ken Glueck, Oracle's senior vice president. "The single-award approach is contrary to well established procurement requirements and is out of sync with industry’s multi-cloud strategy, which promotes constant competition, fosters rapid innovation and lowers prices."

Oracle has long been vocal about objections to the structure and requirements of the ongoing Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, including plans to proceed with a single award and a demand for vendors to meet security classification level only held currently by a single vendor -- Amazon Web Services. (Microsoft announced in October that it would meet similar requirements in time to take on the work of the JEDI contract, should it win.)

Oracle also objected to potential conflicts of interest regarding the former employment of several DOD personnel by AWS.

Ralph O. White, GAO's managing associate general counsel for procurement law, said DOD reasonably decided "a single-award approach is in the government’s best interests for various reasons, including national security concerns." GAO also said that allegations of conflicts of interest among participants in the design of the procurement "do not provide a basis for sustaining Oracle's protest."

IBM has a JEDI protest pending at GAO, which is recently supplemented. A decision is due Jan. 18, but according to FCW's sibling publication Washington Technology, GAO will likely dismiss IBM's protest. That's because the Court of Federal Claims trumps GAO's bid protest adjudication authority, and if Oracle is litigating issues similar to the IBM, the court's ruling will determine the outcome of IBM's protest.