In a surprising (or depending on your political leanings perhaps not that surprising) decision, the US Government has stepped in to help Amazon Web Services (AWS) in their appeal against the awarding of a $10bn, 10 year, Department of Defence (DOD), Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) deal to their competitor and rival Microsoft last year.

The deal would mean that Microsoft, for the next ten years would supply all of the DoD’s cloud computing software through Microsoft Azure.

As you can imagine, AWS weren’t over the moon about this decision and so appealed it in court back on the 13th February, being granted an injunction by the Court of Federal Claims which required that all work on the 10 year project cease immediately whilst their objection was considered.

AWS’s lawyers argued that part of Microsoft’s proposal, the bit that related to the type of storage in “Price Scenario 6” didn’t meet the DoD’s previously stipulated requirements and so should have been eliminated from the competition.

The court agreed, giving AWS a chance to show that the DoD "improperly evaluated" Microsoft's proposal to start with.

After the courts decision the DoD has stated AWS and Microsoft need to send in revised offers around Price Scenario 6, giving both Cloud-tech giants the chance to adjust their proposal, but only to a limited extent.

The DoD will also reconsider “its evaluation of the offerors' online marketplace offerings" and possibly "reconsider its award decision in response to the other technical challenges presented by AWS".