Oracle's JEDI mind-meld doesn't work on Uncle Sam's auditors: These are not the govt droids you are looking for Oracle's bid to halt the Pentagon's JEDI $10bn winner-takes-all cloud IT contract has been turned down. Uncle Sam's Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a statement on Wednesday explaining that it would not be taking up Oracle's appeal of the US Department of Defense's stipulation that the entire JEDI technology …
Craig Charles was my favorite Doctor.
Lately when someone mentions Doctor Who I hear the Captain from Blackadder the second (played by you-know-who) saying 'You have a womans Doctor, My Lord!!'
Not really pertinent, just thought I'd try to inflict it on someone else.
40 years of demanding companies only lock into Oracle tech and now you're whining like a bunch of toddelrs because it might mean you won't get a look in now you're bidding for deals? Excuse me while I adopt a Nelson Munz pose and say "Ha! Ha!".
I've suffered at the hands of Oracle's nasty severe audits where they literally checked every executing process from their software to see what charges could be added to the bill, I hope they award the whole damn contract to Bezos and Co, stuff it right up Larry and his dying-on-its-arse company.
"allegations regarding conflicts of interest do not provide a basis for sustaining Oracle’s protest". Can anyone fluent in legal jargon please confirm - this to me doesn't sound anything like the 'stronly deny all allegations' usual statements, so other vendors DID help write the contract?
Sorry - Fifth Doctor, not Fourth.
The Awakening.
TURLOUGH: Good. I quite miss that brown liquid they drink here.
CHANDLER: Ale.
TURLOUGH: No, er, tea.
CHANDLER: What be tea?
DOCTOR: Oh, a noxious infusion of oriental leaves containing a high percentage of toxic acid.
CHANDLER: Sounds an evil brew, don't it.
DOCTOR: True. Personally, I rather like it.
So I've been reading humorous IT stuff and nonsense from the bilges of the good ship El Reg for a good few years now, but this statement must be up there as one the funniest and deluded things I've had the pleasure of snorting a mouthful of tea all over my keyboard over...
"We are convinced that if given the opportunity to compete, DoD would choose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for a very substantial portion of its workloads because OCI delivers the best, most performant and most secure product available at the best price."
So... dear Oracle, you may be deludedly convinced. But no-one else is. You barely have the in house skills to manage, train and consult on your own products - so only Herodotus knows why anyone would trust you with a contract of this size. Which BTW includes a load of non-cloud related stuff that you simply don't have a track record in doing.
IBM will get it. That's my $0.10 worth. HP at a distant second. None of the others will be trusted by Donald Gump and his cronies as they are foreign owned, and therefore very scary.
Given past history of government contracts, vender performance, and gold plating by those government managers involved, it most likely won't ever work even with massive cost overruns.
There's probably going to be massive off-shoring and sub-contracting to help the winners bottom line.
"... because the agency reasonably determined that a single-award approach is in the government’s best interests for various reasons ..."
could be rewritten in plain Merican-English as
"... we are not a financially corrupt institution and we live in the land of the free, like what His Excellency our Glorious Leader the Hair Monster says, so actually it's all ok because 'reasons'. Please move along and continue to enjoy freedom somewhere else before I set security on you."
I hope what is most occurring is that they want "one throat to choke." Years of finger pointing, lack of cooperation between contractors, and lack interoperability between said partner have sunk too many projects. Something this large really should be done by one company, even if they sub-contract it out to Tartarus and back.
Oracle only wants the contact so they can audit every 30 days and charge for things they know are not being used the way they claim. The stories I have heard from DBAs make me believe the Mafia moved into technology.
I doubt it, but one can hope...
Chiefly, Oracle – let's make that clear, Oracle – thinks locking an agency into a single legacy vendor is a bad idea in terms of innovation and security.
Personally I think they're right, even if they do have ulterior motives for that point of view. On the other hand, having hundreds of small vendors is even worse in terms of security, so I suppose I can at least see where GAO is coming from.
Less cooks in the kitchen working on the same pudding. Especially in the upper management tiers.
It is only unsound, if there happens to be a catastrophic vulnerability which cannot be monitored for and cannot be mitigated, which is very rare these days.
Not to mention, it's a lot easier to monitor one set of products, instead of many; where, when there is a problem--everyone points blame on everyone else. In the case of one vendor, the buck/responsibility is easily attributed to... and quickly rectified.
The DoD has been the InfoSec model for the USGov't. InfoSec w/n the DoD began to lock down things in 2007 (DIACAP) with increased responsibility laid on IASE/DISA and then more in 2014. After the 2016 elections, the rest of the Gov't was made to come on board with the additions to the CSA.
While most of the US Govt has been a laughing stock for InfoSec, the DoD--with some exceptions--has been doing it right for a while. Not to mention, the requirements the DoD laid out over the past 15 years when bidding out contracts, has arguably been the biggest drivers to InfoSec infrastructure development covering the entire stack. Especially in high speed, low frequency wireless security.
Oracle, careful what you ask for. Ask Cisco what happened when they began to demand and attempt to pin the DoD into a corner. Suddenly, they were losing contracts (and good engineers) they sat on for years to minority, female veteran owned companies.
Don't ever think you're the only game in town, especially with DoD contracts. The blue collar personnel working on them, just move to the company who wins the contract, and business goes on as normal...well, except for your stock holders.
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