Microsoft won the Pentagon’s massive $10 billion cloud computing contract over competitors like Amazon. Reuters brought this interesting news to our attention in their article, “Microsoft wins Pentagon’s $10 bln cloud computing contract.”
The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud (JEDI) contract is part of a broad modernization of the Pentagon’s information technology systems and had been mired in conflict of interest allegations involving a former Pentagon employee who worked on the contract as well as for Amazon.com. Adding to that the president’s outspoken criticism of Amazon and its founder, that put the Pentagon in a difficult place.
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources without direct active management by the user. Large clouds, predominant today, often have functions distributed over multiple locations from central servers.
This has been seen as a giant deal after a hard fought battle, as Oracle and IBM previously held hopes they could win the cloud computing prize.
Melody K. Smith
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