Kate Mulgrew, ooooh, that voice!
Use the courts, Jeff: Amazon to contest Microsoft scooping $10bn JEDI contract
Amazon is headed for court to contest the surprise decision to hand Microsoft the $10bn US Department of Defense JEDI IT supply contract. Jeff Bezos' retail-cum-cloud empire alleges that Microsoft won because of "political influence" and "unmistakable bias". The company has also accused the US defence department of failing to …
COMMENTS
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Friday 15th November 2019 14:22 GMT Tom 38
Re: Jeff appears to be a little bit upset....
Right, it just happened that MS have the better cloud offering than the people who basically invented the whole thing, and has absolutely nothing to do with the Cheeto-in-chief loathing Bezos and his newspaper that says truthful and mean things about him.
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Monday 18th November 2019 10:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "failing to run a fair procurement contest"
"Right, because he didn't win it, it wasn't fair."
In this case, I suspect he is upset because while AWS had the best proposition, they haven't won.
Against Oracle and IBM, AWS and Microsoft were so far ahead that Oracle and IBM weren't even in the race and yet Oracle still protested that it was unfair.
Against Microsoft, AWS have about a three year head start on migrations as a large chunk of DoD cloud hosting is already with AWS because their competitors are still standing up DoD GovCloud facilities.
The analogy I would make is with car racing - AWS have been winning the race for the last 4-5 years with very little competition and meet ALL of the DoD's requirements. This year there will be some competition but their car is only running on two wheels at the moment and is likely to start the race 6 months late (Azure are still standing up facilities to meet DoD GovCloud resilience requirements - I do not believe these are operational at this point in time). In two years time, Oracle and IBM hope to be ready to join the race if the DoD pays them enough.
The irony of Oracles complaints about the DoD being dependent on one supplier with JEDI going to AWS is that JEDI and most office requirements (i.e. Office365) is that the DoD has effectively gone with one supplier at this point in time.
On paper, there was one clear winner for the JEDI contract in terms of cost, ability to deliver services and meet time frames that the DoD wanted as well as fitted in with other strategic IT decisions the DoD has made.
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Tuesday 19th November 2019 12:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "failing to run a fair procurement contest"
"If I were the DoD, I'd want to support the competition to make sure some still exists."
This is the argument I am making - the DoD strategy was for two primary vendors (AWS and Azure) and a number of specialist providers for state/special projects DC's.
With AWS losing JEDI, the bids already awarded to Microsoft/Azure for office productivity tools now look short-sighted as they tied the DoD into a lot of Azure GovCloud services.
As for other vendors, once they stop playing stupid games (i.e. make the DoD pay for everything we can think of) they may stop winning stupid prizes (losing lawsuits in new ways). The DoD has tried to get vendors to change their behaviour, the vendors haven't changed and so they have been left out.
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Monday 18th November 2019 13:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Having been on Azure
Actually it's much easier for Microsoft. All the layered security, constrained delegation, conditional access, Just Enough Administration, configuration field level ACLs and auditing erc etc are baked in from the groumd up whereas Amazon have to build a complex zoo of bolt ons to reach a similar level.
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Saturday 16th November 2019 02:08 GMT sbt
All other considerations
I suspect a lot of these court cases are fought for PR, particularly for the shareholders' benefit. To show, 1) We weren't incompetent and should have won the bid
2) We always about making you that extra bit of profit (even if we really don't).
It's the business equivalent of the toddler-tantrum.
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Monday 18th November 2019 11:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "Oracle accused AWS of a variety of dodgy practices"
Very much so.
Oracle have scrapped every ounce of pork from the DoD barrel - suggesting that there are dodgy practices within AWS maybe (i.e. I can't validate that it was not corrupt) accurate BUT it is an order of magnitude less than the dodgy practices that existing vendors were involved in, including Oracle.
Some of the stories around charges for changes to DoD equipment in data centres managed by third parties are hilarious if it wasn't for the fact that US tax payers were paying for this behaviour.
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Tuesday 19th November 2019 16:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
"And Azure is a fundamentally better and easier to use product any way."
Which explains why Azure will likely take an extra 6+ months to get their facilities up to the required minimum level. Azure is playing catchup with AWS in GovCloud. Google Azure Govcloud facilities if you don't believe me - Azure is still building out their West Coast infrastructure to support this bid.
What you call "schmoozing" is probably referred to as "working with a partner who can deliver the capabilities you require" in most industries - DoD's security model left a lot to be desired 10 years ago. Google and AWS did a lot to address that between 2009-2013, mainly due to challenges put forward by the incumbents before Azure had any real public IaaS cloud to speak of. Azure only really joined the GovCloud party ~4 years ago and are still catching up with their main competitor.
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