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AWS evaluating options after losing US' $10bn Cloud contract

Washington, Oct 27

Surprised at the US Department of Defense (DoD) decision to award a $10 billion Pentagon contract to Microsoft, Amazon's Cloud arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) has said it is evaluating options.

In a shocker to Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, the Donald Trump government awarded the much-anticipated $10 billion Cloud contract for Pentagon known as the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) to the Satya Nadella-led Microsoft.

"We're surprised about this conclusion. AWS is the clear leader in cloud computing, and a detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings clearly lead to a different conclusion," the company said in a statement on Saturday.

"We remain deeply committed to continuing to innovate for the new digital battlefield where security, efficiency, resiliency, and scalability of resources can be the difference between success and failure," the company spokesperson added.

Despite being the frontrunner, AWS lost the prestigious Cloud contract that will provide enterprise level, commercial Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) to support Department of Defence business and mission operations.

Even Microsoft was somewhat caught off-guard by the DoD announcement.

A company spokesperson told Geek Wire that they are "working on this right now".

The Pentagon selected Microsoft and AWS, cloud computing arm of Amazon, as the two finalists for its $10 billion Cloud contract, as earlier contender Oracle missed the bus.

The JEDI Cloud computing contract is aimed to bring the entire military under the envelope of a single Cloud provider.

Trump, who has been a critic of Amazon and Bezos over the company's tax arrangements, even got involved during the bidding process, saying the government was looking at the contract after "getting enormous complaints" from competitors to Amazon and Microsoft.