Shortly after Microsoft’s come-from-behind win over Amazon in a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract last October, its CEO, Satya Nadella, credited the victory to the software giant’s decision to rise above politics and focus on the needs of the client.

What Nadella didn’t mention is that Microsoft for over a year quietly worked with another big tech company, Oracle, to prevent Amazon—the market leader in cloud computing—from walking away with the entire contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, as the military project is known. Lobbyists for the two companies jointly pressed an influential political leader to make their case with the Pentagon, while the companies sponsored a task force at a conservative think tank that argued the military shouldn’t award the contract to a single entity. Microsoft stopped making that argument after the Pentagon decided it would give the contract to one company.