How's this for a JEDI mind trick? AWS waves hand, has Uncle Sam 'reconsider' $10bn contract award to Microsoft The US government has filed a motion [PDF] to the Court of Federal Claims asking for 120 days to "reconsider certain aspects" of the Pentagon's decision to hand Microsoft the JEDI super-cloud contract – yet Amazon Web Services will oppose the motion. Microsoft was awarded the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) …
As an aside it occurred to me that a cloud provider will no doubt work relentlessly to lock in any customer in a number of ways and likely succeed. After which it is just about tightening the screws for as much money as can be squeezed out. Which will be plenty when the customer is a government; in effect the power to tax has been handed to a for-profit corporation.
While your observations about cloud providers are interesting, may I suggest you cast your net wider and include incumbent DoD suppliers?
Who needs "vendor lock in" when you just get the customer to pay you to acquire and build everything, charge them hefty maintenance and support fees, include sky high rates for any changes and wrap it in a 20 year contract to allow same "savings" to be passed to the customer. Unless the customer triggers an early exit clause that doubles the costs again.
JEDI is about reducing an estimated $15-25bn spend over 10 years with incumbents to a capped $10bn fee. Yup...that's how much cloud lock in saves over the existing DoD outsourcers....
a cloud provider will no doubt work relentlessly to lock in any customer in a number of ways
Oracle has probably been doing this for YEARS with THEIR solutions...
and you've heard of "job security" with contractors, right?
What the Feds need to do is scope it out properly so that the risk of this is minimized, knowing it CAN (and probably WILL) happen if it is NOT in the contract.
Trump is a 'contract guy". I hope he and his people are involved enough in the process to address this very REAL concern.
Inasmuch as the real purpose of democratic government is to decide who gets to award fat government contracts to whom, I submit that this conflict may best be described as a catfight between two teens, both eager to establish credentials as Uncle Sam's bestie, in the hopes that the sweet milk of graft shall ever flow in their direction.
Of course, it's just an analogy.
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