The court ruled Oracle did not meet the bid’s criteria, and therefore its arguments that the contract violated federal law and unfairly preferred Amazon did not have to be considered. The U.S. government can now award the contract to either Amazon or Microsoft, the remaining contenders. Oracle’s stock fell 0.27 per cent at publication time. (Bloomberg)

Talking point: This is a major loss for Oracle, as this decade-long contract—dubbed the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI—represents a substantial share of the federal defence business. But it’s a gain for the Pentagon, as Oracle and other firms including Microsoft had lobbied to change the government’s single-winner strategy to allowing multiple companies. The Pentagon argues that choosing just one company to build out its entire cloud allows is the best way for it to maintain control; Oracle and Microsoft said it stifles innovation. The competition is now between Amazon and Microsoft, and the former was the industry leader through its subsidiary, Amazon Web Services. As of the fourth quarter of 2018, the e-commerce giant had the largest market share of the cloud infrastructure market. But rival Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform has since been catching up.