Oracle Loses Appeal in $10 Billion Pentagon Contract Fight (bloomberg.com) 23
A U.S. appeals court rejected Oracle's challenges to the Pentagon's disputed $10 billion cloud-computing contract. From a report: Oracle had raised a number of issues, including allegations of conflicts of interest with Amazon.com, and claims the Pentagon violate its own rules when it set up the contract to be awarded to a single firm. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a lower court ruling that Oracle wasn't harmed by any errors the Pentagon made in developing the contract proposal because it wouldn't have qualified for the contract anyway. Oracle was fighting its exclusion from seeking the lucrative cloud-computing deal, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. The Pentagon awarded the contract to Microsoft in October over market leader Amazon Web Services. The project, which is valued at as much as $10 billion over a decade, is designed to help the Pentagon consolidate its technology programs and quickly move information to warfighters around the world.
Oracle's tiny violin (Score:3)
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Yes, I can. It's beautiful.
It sounds like...the whining of an rich, misentitled asshole; it's simply sublime.
Tiny violin? Larrys bought a stradovarius (Score:2)
And he's going to make damn sure the whole world hears it!
Well, there's your problem (Score:1)
no photo ops of Larry Ellison giving trump credit for, well, everything
Good! (Score:1)
Not that I'm any happier that Microsoft got awarded that contract, mind you.
In fact, it's more than a little disturbing that one single company gets to received so much taxpayer's money to provide a service that said humongous amount of money could easily have been used to develop an in-house solution, without the security implications of third-party cloudiness.
But hey, that's how crony capitalism works I guess...
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Governments have blown plenty of money on out-sourced contracts as well. Companies like Deloitte and HP have even been sanctioned on occasion by governments by failing delivering projects on time and/or on budget.
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could easily have been used to develop an in-house solution
No, not in a million years. The Pentagon does not have the in-house talent, and if they go to the trouble to develop it all the good people will leave for better jobs the day after training is finished. The Pentagon does not have the reliable high speed world-wide network to support distributed cloud computing, Amazon and Google do, Microsoft barely does, Oracle is worse off than the Pentagon. The Pentagon does not begin to have the sites or the hardware to start a cloud computing effort, and building ou
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Unless your needs are very basic or you are aggressively careful about it; the various cloud offerings aren't exactly write-once-run-anywhere interchangeable competitors. All conceptually similar; and all offer broadly the same collection of features; but not exactly drop-in.
Targeting two or more would be more complex and costly up front, definitely; but ta
Seems to be standard procedure (Score:2)
Any time a company loses a bid for a big government contract, they sue. Too bad I never snagged that law degree...
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Yes, actually it is standard procedure. Because the legal cost of a lawsuit is still insignificant compared to the potential benefits.
Remember: It's never about right or wrong, good or bad, ethical or unethical, moral or immoral. It's always about money.
One of the case I wish both could lose, but... (Score:2)
In this case I think that Oracle was probably correct. I'm not closely familiar with it, so don't take this too seriously, but from news reports it looked as if the contract was designed to go to Amazon. But I admit I looked at the news reports and said to myself "Couldn't they both lose?". And then lost interest, because it looked as if the answer was "No.".
They did (Score:2)
They did both lose. Microsoft ended up with the contract - although most strongly suspect it is due to Trump's public feud with Bezos.
Weird phrasing (Score:2)
Oracle,blah, blah blah,they can go to heck. But one thing I found odd is the phrasing of this sentence from the article/summary
"The Pentagon awarded the contract to Microsoft in October over market leader Amazon Web Services."
Why include 'market leader' with Amazon? Then it seems to imply that the pentagon made a wrong or unusual choice by not picking the largest company versus say picking the best choice no matter the market share.
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The initial DoD RFP was basically designed for AWS, back when Obama was president. Sure Microsoft and Oracle submitted bids as well, but the RFP was very AWS specific.
Then Trump got elected, and his beef with Bezos and WaPo is well known enough that it's entirely possible Trump had a finger in the pie
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If that is what happened, then Amazon has a case - the President cannot rule out a legitimate bidder because they have a personal or political beef with them.
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quote>it seems to imply that the pentagon made a wrong or unusual choice
That's because they did. AWS has all of the capabilities they need, Azure has some of them. AWS has a globe-spanning high speed network with nodes in over 50 countries, Azure may be up to 20 now and their links tend to be lower quality. AWS has the in-house talent to facilitate the migration of these projects, Azure will need to develop it. AWS has several security teams that are larger than the entire IT department of most large