Oracle said it plans to appeal a recent court decision that saw the dismissal of its challenge against the US’ JEDI cloud contract, the company confirmed on Monday.
Oracle has consistently argued that the procurement process of the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, awarded by the US Department of Defence, contravened federal laws and unfairly favoured AWS over other providers.
The company filed a lawsuit against the DoD in December last year, arguing that there were conflicts of interest between former Pentagon and AWS employees. Before a ruling was made on that lawsuit, Oracle was removed from the bidding process in April when it failed to meet the requirement of having three data centres with FedRAMP Moderate ‘Authorised’ support.
The Federal Claims Court ruled in July that because Oracle was unable to qualify for the bid criteria, it lacked the legal standing to challenge the procurement process and therefore dismissed its lawsuit.
Oracle believes the latest dismissal fails to address federal laws that prohibit the awarding of contracts to a single provider.
“Federal procurement laws specifically bar single award procurements such as JEDI absent satisfying specific, mandatory requirements, and the Court in its opinion clearly found DoD did not satisfy these requirements,” said Dorian Daley, general counsel for Oracle.
“The opinion also acknowledges that the procurement suffers from many significant conflicts of interest. These conflicts violate the law and undermine the public trust. As a threshold matter, we believe that the determination of no standing is wrong as a matter of law, and the very analysis in the opinion compels a determination that the procurement was unlawful on several grounds.”
JEDI, a contract said to be worth up to $10 billion, will see the winning bidder take charge of hosting and distributing DoD workloads, including those related to classified military operations. Currently, Microsoft and AWS are the only providers being considered for the contract – Google dropped out of the running early after an employee protest claimed the deal would contravene company ethics.
Earlier this month the DoD announced it would suspend the awarding of the contract while it investigates allegations of bias towards AWS.