Oracle Files New Appeal Over Pentagon's $10B JEDI Cloud Contract RFP Process (techcrunch.com) 48
You really have to give Oracle a lot of points for persistence, especially where the $10 billion JEDI cloud contract procurement process is concerned. An anonymous reader shares a report:For more than a year, the company has been complaining across every legal and government channel it can think of. In spite of every attempt to find some issue with the process, it has failed every time. That did not stop it today from filing a fresh appeal of last month's federal court decision that found against the company
. Oracle refuses to go quietly into that good night, not when there are $10 billion federal dollars on the line, and today the company announced it was appealing Federal Claims Court Senior Judge Eric Bruggink's decision.
Just wait... (Score:2)
... till Disney sues the government over copyright infringement for the projectâ(TM)s name. Things are really going to get interesting then...
Re: (Score:1)
I despise Oracle, but... (Score:1)
Why is there a gigantic $10B "cloud computing" government contract in the first place? More gov't spying infrastructure is my guess. The best place to spy on people is by running on the Meltdown/Spectre vulnerable cloud servers that everybody else is using. That means this gov't contract was destined to go to Amazon right from the get-go.
It's nice of Oracle to protest this $10B contract, but Oracle has a snowball's chance in hell of ever winning this contract for themselves. Not unless Oracle suddenly becam
Re: (Score:2)
Actually the poster seems to be making fun of Iron Sky:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1... [imdb.com]
It is kind of spammy though. Who needs that many swastikas? Said troll poster could never have designed banners at real Nazi rallies in the 30s.
Re: (Score:2)
Oracle is poison (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why companies hate working with Oracle and are moving to alternatives where possible. They are happy to sue their customers over minor licence disagreements, ex customers when they dropped Oracle due to licence costs, and now people that choose to never work with them when their products don't even meet requirements.
Re: (Score:2)
On the other hand, it is suspicious that anyone would be stupid enough to decide to award this contract to only one cloud provider at a time. I'm not saying Oracle doesn't have an evil secret agenda here, I'm just saying they're probably not the only ones...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's two cloud providers: AWS and Microsoft.
Re: (Score:2)
AvP (Score:2)
It's two cloud providers: AWS and Microsoft.
Though it sound a bit like the motto of Aliens versus Predator : Whoever Wins...We Lose
Re: (Score:3)
"Oracle filed suit in federal court last week alleging yet again that the decade-long $10 billion Pentagon JEDI contract with its single-vendor award is unfair and illegal" https://techcrunch.com/2018/12... [techcrunch.com]
"Microsoft hasn’t been happy about the one-vendor idea either, pointing out that by limiting itself to a single vendor, the Pentagon could be missing out on innovation from the other companies in the back and forth world of the cloud market, especially when we’re tal
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Oracle is poison (Score:5, Insightful)
I totally agree that Oracle are litigious assholes that nobody wants to work with (because they sue customers regularly)
However. I used to do a lot of work tendering for government contracts, and its actually pretty routine to sue when things seem like something is wrong with the tender. The one we encountered was some idiot consultant has shared your bid with a competitor (it happens *all* the time) . Quite often you can get pretty strong hints that a government minister or public servant has links with the winning bidder too. So you sue. And quite often the govt then settles for some sort of "go away" money. The govt knows that everyone does that and usually doesn't hold it against you.
Of course its the taxpayer that loses out of it, but there is a moral to this story that you need serious compliance checks in tender processes or these lawsuits will happen.
This is the military though, and outside of special/black forces (who often have reduced compliance requirements for obvious national security reasons , ie "black budget" stuff) military procurement tends to be fanatical about compliance and paper work.
So I doubt Oracle will prevail. And actually I doubt Oracle thinks it'll prevail. But it'll try anyway because thats a big fat stash of cash on offer. And also because Oracle are cunts.
Re: (Score:3)
Another probably appealable item is when the requirements are written to say "use this package", without actually saying it, by reading off a laundry list of subrequirements that match the feature set of Package X and only Package X.
I was working on a proposal where this happened. The feature set was word-for-word the feature set of WordPerfect, and our company was proposing Word (for DOS, way back in the day).
Re:Oracle is poison (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not impossible this happened in this case either. According to TFA, an employee of Amazon quit, was hired by the DoD and joined the committee that helped write the proposal and requirements, then later was re-hired by Amazon. And this was investigated (twice, apparently), but everyone denies there's any conflict of interest or impropriety here. Granted, someone previously employed at Amazon would probably be a good resource for writing the specs, as they'd be very knowledgeable about what might be needed, but anyone has to admit that looks damned shady.
All that being said, whatever sorts of shenanigans went on with the procurement process, I still feel it's in the US military's best interest to stay as far away from Oracle as possible, given the long list of disastrous outcomes when contracting on government projects. The last thing we need is a ten billion dollar boondoggle wasted on stuffing Oracle's coffers. I feel a bit hypocritical saying that, because regarding the rule of law, I generally don't feel it's a good idea to look the other way only when the outcome happens to be favorable.
Re: (Score:2)
tl;dr
Oracle are litigious assholes.
military procurement tends to be fanatical about compliance and paper work.
So I doubt Oracle will prevail. Oracle are cunts.
Re: Oracle is poison (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Its not so much big-c corruption, its more that the processes are often subtly compromised. The consultant may be friends with the guys from one of the tenderers and writes the tender docs with a bit of a lean towards the friends, not because of corruption, but more a bias.
I mean , on the corporate side, we have entire fields of study on how to wormtounge these people. Product demonstrations, lobbying, and the like. It even gets worse at the big end of town. military contractors lobby their senators (and b
Re: (Score:2)
You are orificially confused.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
(posting AC because I still need to work in this business).
I learned as a young pup 30 years ago...
Nothing good every comes of doing business with Oracle. You'll regret it for decades, because that's how long it will take you to extricate yourself from the lopsided contracts you must sign to be graced with paying oracle too much money for a product that's barely differentiated from no-cost options.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Oracle is poison (Score:5, Insightful)
It's amazing to me Oracle thinks that suing the government is going to make them (or other customers) think "Hey, actually, these might be the guys we want to work with for the next decade or two!" To my mind, the fact that the defense dept is staying far away from Oracle means the procurement process is working reasonably well.
Re:Oracle is poison (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure is.... It would also be cool if after they get this case sorted, they add Oracle to a "banned vendors" list, or something of that ilk due to their misbehavior in umm suing them and costing taxpayer money with no legitimate basis.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Oracle is poison (Score:5, Informative)
This is why companies hate working with Oracle
In all my years of working in tech, I have never met anyone who has worked with Oracle and was happy with the result.
They overprice, delay, and underdeliver. They try to bypass the engineers, and talk directly to managers who are dumb enough to believe their FUD.
Oracle's failures are legion. They screwed California taxpayers [theregister.co.uk] out of $93M. Oracle designed Oregon's Obamacare website, which was the most expensive, way behind schedule, the most bloated (sucking in megabytes of libraries on every page load), and the most difficult for users to navigate. The website cost taxpayers more than $300M, despite being the worst of all ACA sites. Kentucky's ACA site was judged to be the best, was ready and responsive on day one, and cost $3M, 1% of what Oracle charged Oregon.
The only good thing about Oracle is that if you can convince one of their salesmen that you are a "decision maker", you can get about a week of free booze, hookers, and blackjack before they figure out that you are faking it.
Re: (Score:1)
The only good thing about Oracle is that if you can convince one of their salesmen that you are a "decision maker", you can get about a week of free booze, hookers, and blackjack before they figure out that you are faking it.
That there is the key to Oracles success. They generally sell to people way above most technical decision makers heads and the technical people are left to try and cobble the shit together. Oracle seems to be one of the few IT companies that actively avoid talking to the tech people. I guess it gets them the money.
Always (Score:2)
Oracle has always been about intimidation, marketing, and hype. Anybody who studies the history of the company knows that. The only people who ever defend Oracle are those who have climbed up Larry's ass and nestled there for a career.
Re: (Score:1)
Constitutional? (Score:3)
Jedi? What happened to separation of church and state?
Re: (Score:3)
Jedi? What happened to separation of church and state?
The US Constitution has been deprecated.
Didn't you read the release notes . . . ?
Re: (Score:2)
Disney has a cruise designed just for you! Now, where did I leave my U-boat...?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's a military contract. There are no atheists in a foxhole.
$10 Billion... like hell... (Score:2)
Then they will be able to sell parts of the failed project off to others for another $10 Billion.
This is how (Score:2)
you get uninvited from every future RFP at every potential customer. If you invite these guys to respond to an RFP, and you don't pick them, they'll sue you.
LOL, Oracle (Score:5, Funny)
Oracle is one of the few companies that will sue you for daring to be a customer as well as not daring to be a customer.
Ah, Oracle. The new SCO. (Score:4, Insightful)
I can remember when SCO actually wrote software, as opposed to being a lawsuit-happy organization that litigated itself out of business.
I can also remember when Oracle was a nasty organization that did an ok database. Now, it seems, they are the database also-rans that want to become lawsuit-happy. Oh well.
I actually quite like their RDBMS (Score:2)
The tech in it is pretty impressive IMO and was obviously written by rare people in Oracle - ie ones who know their shit. Its just a shame about the other BS - both technical and human - that surrounds it.
Re: (Score:1)