After years of pain over the legal battles related to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract, Microsoft is calling on Congress to take a look at the protest process.
During a Tuesday Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on emerging technologies and national security, Microsoft President Brad Smith said it’s time to examine the protest process because it does not keep up with the speed of technological innovation. Smith’s remarks come as continuing legal troubles threaten to sink JEDI, which Microsoft was re-awarded in September.
“We all want to ensure fairness,” Smith said. “And that includes a fair right to be heard. But we could definitely benefit from an accelerated timeline to do so.”
The Defense Department conceived the $10 billion JEDI concept around four years ago, but implementation has been held back because of multiple legal challenges from Oracle, IBM and Amazon Web Services throughout the procurement. Oracle recently filed a petition with the Supreme Court for a review of a decision on its own pre-award JEDI protest.
As it stands, a decision from a federal judge on a motion filed by Microsoft and DoD on portions of AWS’s protest alleging improper political influence in the award process by administration officials is pending.
Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2021/02/microsoft-president-calls-bid-protest-reforms/172248/
Also see: https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2021/02/should-pentagon-reform-its-bid-protest-rules/172260/
