Judge denies Oracle's requests to add to JEDI cloud contract sueball Oracle's bid to depose two former US government staffers and pull in extra material to support its legal wrangling over the $10bn Pentagon cloud contract has failed. In an order filed under seal last week but now publicly reissued, Eric Bruggink, the senior judge in the case, denied Oracle's requests. It follows his refusal to …
"As well as taking issue with the single vendor award and what it says are unnecessarily restrictive criteria, Oracle's argument focused on two former DoD employees, Deap Ubhi and Anthony DeMartino."
Assuming Oracles issue with the JEDI contract is similar to IBM's, the "unnecessarily restrictive criteria" amount to "the vendor will provide a significant portion of the tendered service in the first year without requiring the DoD to pay the majority of the value of the contract".
In other words, if you already have large government data centers with connectivity to key government facilities, you are at an advantage. i.e. Azure, Google and AWS.
IBM and Oracle would prefer the DoD to pay for shiny new data centers and start delivering the services in 1+ years. Like they have done in the past. Which may explain why the DoD is so annoyed at the slow progress on consolidating their infrastructure.
Even if Oracle are successful in this legal challenge, the most they stand to win is an even more annoyed DoD and the contract probably going to Azure as Google have withdrawn citing employee unhappiness with working for with the DoD, but more likely related to being behind AWS/Azure in the government cloud certification process.
On the other hand, it may mean a 1-2 year delay in services moving away from existing Oracle-managed government data centers and the legal challenge may be the less financially damaging option.
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