Oracle Files Second Supplemental Protest Against JEDI

Oracle ratcheted up legal pressure on the Defense Department to rethink its $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract with another bid protest filing Sept. 6.

The filing—made with the Government Accountability Office—is the second supplemental protest Oracle has made since it filed its original bid protest against JEDI on Aug. 6, less than two weeks after the Pentagon bid the contract out.

As with its previous supplemental protest, which is an amendment to its original protest, it is unclear on what grounds Oracle is further protesting the contract. The company’s initial protest took issue with the Pentagon’s decision to award JEDI to a single cloud provider, claiming a single-award approach “is contrary to industry’s multi-cloud strategy, which promotes constant competition, fosters innovation and lowers prices.”

The second supplemental protest comes after the Pentagon extended the deadline to accept bids for JEDI from Sept. 17 to Oct. 9. The Pentagon announced that decision Aug. 31, and attributed it to the “content of the amendments and offeror requests.”

In previous weeks, the Pentagon received and answered several hundred questions from industry. The additional time was to allow companies to incorporate any changes in the procurement into their technical bids.

JEDI is the Pentagon’s largest cloud procurement to date, and will put a single cloud provider in charge of hosting and storing secret and top-secret data used by warfighters around the world. Announced last year, tech titans have jockeyed in public and behind the scenes for position in JEDI.