Never tell me the odds! Oracle makes fresh appeal against $10bn JEDI ruling Oracle is having one last shake of the dice by going back to court to try to force the Pentagon to reconsider kicking it out of the running for the $10bn contract to run cloud services for the US Department of Defense. The long-running battle will see Oracle appeal the July decision of the US Court of Federal Claims which …
This will decide the fate of Oracles cloud business, as they're heavily dependent on government money in the US. I think Oracle have accepted that they will not be a major cloud provider in the future, but fighting to remain in JEDI delays larger write offs as the DoD have to honour existing hosting requirements until JEDI is decided.
An estimated 15% of Oracle revenue comes from the US Government - replacing databases and ERP/financial applications will require more than just losing a cloud contract, but Oracle will need to improve their product portfolio as other vendors will become more competitive.
Oracle aren't in the dustbin just yet, regardless of the outcome. They won't be on the DoD's Christmas card list. Unless the DoD is sending tomahawk missiles.
"Amazon and AWS’s well publicised strategic move off Oracle DB technology will enable this."
Yeah but nah....
The DoD's use of Oracle extends past just the database and into the apps as well. While some database workload will move off of Oracle onto Azure/AWS offerings it won't come close to eliminating Oracle.
Where it will hurt Oracle is in actual usage - while the DoD and US Government in general get significant volume discounts, the information I've seen would suggest that better licence management and using non-Oracle platforms for systems that don't require Oracle or supporting applications could lead to some useful savings.
Annual US Government (not just DoD) spend with Oracle is around $5bn, a few percentage points of savings quickly adds up to significant numbers assuming JEDI was moderately successful...
Grateful will you be, that no the dumb-pire said...
This thing is going to turn into a monumental shitshow - think the SA80, the Zip-22, Jimmy Saville at the BBC, Buncefield and playing ping-pong with shaped lumps of hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane; in a crèche, all rolled up into one huge shit sandwich. The whole idea makes S "I have a cunning plan" Baldrick look like Einstein and Carl Sagan combined.
Personally I wouldn't be walking away from this. I'd have an Oldsmobile 4-4-2 with the engine running and warmed through waiting by the back entrance.
Things I learnt from El Reg's commentards, part 163: hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane.
"Requirements for the contract had originally been so tough that only four bidders entered the race: Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. The DoD then further tightened security requirements so that only MS and Bezos's lot were left in the running."
My reading indicated that you needed to be able to provide multiple DC's in two or more states and they had to be FedRAMP approved - AWS, Azure, IBM and Oracle were already FedRAMP cloud service providers and I believe Googles approval is started but was paused by Google and Google choose to withdraw from JEDI (this may have changed). The only other vendor that I could imagine joining this group is AT&T but I'm unsure if they are a FedRAMP CSP.
The selection process ruled out IBM and Oracle because they were not competitive on price (>$200m higher in years 1-2 due to acquire required DCs) and delivery timelines (1-2 year setup timeline leading to an additional $200m-$500m cost increase for the DoD) - can you provide any information indicating it was a tightened security requirement? The FedRAMP CSP requirements already specified security requirements that are reviewed regularly, so all existing CSP's would have had to comply with those regardless of JEDI.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
