Oracle protests JEDI exclusion
Now that it's officially out of the running for the Pentagon's $10 billion warfighter cloud award, Oracle has updated its ongoing lawsuit against the procurement and its requirements.
Oracle is pushing ahead with its lawsuit against the Department of Defense over the 10-year, $10 billion cloud procurement known as JEDI.
The company filed a supplemental complaint in its ongoing protest of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure solicitation. A redacted version of the filing was released May 7.
The lawsuit had been paused for the Pentagon to conduct an internal investigation of several employees with ties to Amazon Web Services who were alleged to have improperly influenced the development of JEDI requirements. DOD asserted that there may have been ethical violations, but overall there was "no adverse impact on the integrity of the acquisition process."
The filing states that Deap Ubhi, a former AWS employee who worked on JEDI as a member of the Defense Digital Service, and a former Navy official who joined AWS whose name is redacted from the complaint accessed "sensitive procurement information" on JEDI after taking jobs with AWS. Both are subject of DOD inspector general investigations, according to the complaint.
In its filing, Oracle characterizes these violations as "a web of lies, ethics violations, and misconduct," which include hidden job offers and promised bonus payments to officials. While Oracle does not agree with the findings of the DOD investigation, the filing states that the terms of the solicitation violate the law regardless of whether they were driven by corruption.
"Oracle believes and asserts that [conflicts of interest] impacted each allegation of this protest, but whether the challenged criteria resulted from procurement misconduct or legal error ultimately does not matter," because the JEDI specifications under protest violated the Federal Acquisition Regulation and procurement law, the filing states.
Oracle updated its complaint to protest its exclusion, along with IBM, from the second round of the JEDI procurement. After a competitive range, the field was winnowed down to two bidders: AWS and Microsoft.
The company has renewed its objections to JEDI's single-award structure because it conflicts with procurement law, and it argues that pursing a single-award indefinite quantity/indefinite delivery model is not supported by the way cloud is typically deployed by large enterprises. Additionally, Oracle takes issue with several specific requirements with regard to security and size as well as the requirement that the winning bidder be able to furnish DOD with a marketplace for add-on applications.