A judge shot down Oracle’s protest against the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI deal, paving the way for Amazon or Microsoft to claim the victory (ORCL, AMZN, MSFT, GOOG, IBM)

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A federal judge rejected Oracle’s protest against the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI contract.
The Defense Department had named Amazon and Microsoft as the finalists for the major cloud project, with Amazon Web Services likely to be tapped as the winner.
The judge rejected Oracle’s arguments that the contract process was riddled with improprieties and that the Pentagon set unfair criteria.
Oracle declined to comment on whether it would pursue the matter further. But a spokesperson said the tech giant looks forward to working with the DoD and other public sector agencies.
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It looks like the Force was not with Oracle in the JEDI saga.

A federal judge on Friday denied Oracle’s bid to be reconsidered for the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, the $10 billion cloud contract known as JEDI.

Oracle had challenged the Defense Department’s decision to name Amazon and Microsoft as the finalists for the contract, rejecting the bids of other tech giants, including Oracle, Google and IBM. Amazon is widely expected to win the contract.

Oracle argued that the contract process was "riddled with improprieties" that largely favored Amazon, including undisclosed employment and bonus offers to DoD officials. The software giant also argued that the standards the DoD set for the contract were unfair.

In a two-page ruling, federal claims judge Eric Bruggink rejected Oracle’s arguments, saying "individual conflicts of interest did not impact the procurement."

Oracle declined to comment on whether it would appeal or pursue the matter further. Spokesperson Deborah Hellinger, however, stressed that Oracle’s cloud technology "provides significant performance and security capabilities over legacy cloud providers.

"We look forward to working with the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and other public sector agencies to deploy modern, secure hyperscale cloud solutions that meet their needs," she told Business Insider.

Amazon Web Services said it "stands ready to support and serve what’s most important – the DoD’s mission of protecting the security of our country."

"The DoD deserves access to the best technology in the world and we are unwavering in our support to their mission," an AWS spokesperson told Business Insider.

The JEDI project will build a platform that will store and manage sensitive military and defense data. It is expected to be one of the biggest public cloud platforms which explains the stiff competition for the contract by the tech industry’s major cloud players.

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