The US government has awarded a giant $10 billion cloud contract to Microsoft over to Amazon, the Department of Defense has confirmed officially. JEDI commonly known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure says that the contract with Microsoft will provide the Pentagon with cloud services for storage and complete power to artificial intelligence processing and machine learning.
DOD Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy says that “The National Defense Strategy dictates that they must improve the speed and proper functioning which will develop modernized technical capabilities to our women and men in US Army”. Microsoft beat out Amazon in the last round for this prestigious contract after the two cloud giants beat out other competitors like IBM and Oracle. Many of the trade analysts thought Amazon to be the frontrunner to win the deal.
This will be a key contract for Microsoft as the company battles Amazon for cloud dominance. This contract has been controversial throughout the bidding process, and because of a legal challenger Oracle lost the contract. President Trump has a special interest in this project and got involved during the biding process and says that the government was looking at the contract after getting huge complaints from Amazon and Microsoft.
This contract with Microsoft will last for 10 years, will be seen as a big win for them, however employees might not necessarily agree. Microsoft employees had a word with their higher officials and they are planning to drop out HoloLens US Army contract which could provide more than 100,000 of the augmented reality headsets for combat and training in the military of US. But Microsoft is still honoring the contract and the US Army are already using HoloLens 2 Headsets for their soldiers.
This is a prestigious contract for Microsoft as they have won this project over there arch rival and this contract has an outsize importance because it is central to the Pentagon’s efforts to modernize its technology.
