Oracle Takes JEDI Cloud Case to Federal Appeals Court


Oracle Corp. on Aug. 26, 2019, filed a notice that it would appeal a federal circuit court's denial of its protest in the Pentagon's enterprise cloud procurement program.? Photo courtesy of Oracle.

Oracle Corp. is appealing a federal claims court’s decision to deny the company’s complaints that the Pentagon is mishandling its search for a department-wide cloud platform.

That brings the lawsuit to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In July, a Court of Federal Claims judge found that Oracle failed to meet certain criteria laid out in the Defense Department’s Joint Enterprise Department Infrastructure solicitation. Because the company couldn’t fulfill all of the requirements, the court ruled Oracle can’t claim the Pentagon is discriminating against it for other reasons.

"The Court of Federal Claims opinion in the JEDI bid protest describes the JEDI procurement as unlawful, notwithstanding dismissal of the protest solely on the legal technicality of Oracle’s purported lack of standing,” Dorian Daley, Oracle’s general counsel, told Air Force Magazine in an Aug. 26 statement. “Federal procurement laws specifically bar single award procurements such as JEDI absent satisfying specific, mandatory requirements, and the court in its opinion clearly found DOD did not satisfy these requirements.”

Daley added the claims court acknowledged “many significant conflicts of interest” that “violate the law and undermine the public trust.”

“As a threshold matter, we believe that the determination of no standing is wrong as a matter of law, and the very analysis in the opinion compels a determination that the procurement was unlawful on several grounds,” Daley said.

The JEDI program aims to build large banks of computer servers to provide troves of military information to troops around the globe and in situations where an internet connection is unavailable. The contract could be worth up to $10 billion over 10 years, though the Defense Department is open to multiple cloud providers over the life of the program.

The Pentagon did not immediately answer how Oracle’s appeal will affect the upcoming contract award to either Microsoft or Amazon, which is slated for this fall at the earliest. IBM also competed for the contract but is no longer in the running.