Judge Vulcan-nerve pinches JEDI deal after Amazon forks out $42m to pause Microsoft's military machinations A US federal court today slammed the brakes on the Pentagon's decision to award Microsoft the JEDI cloud mega-contract. Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith granted Amazon its requested restraining order that effectively pauses the ten-year $10bn winner-takes-all deal. The web giant applied for the order to give it time to challenge …
Anyone who hires MSFT for some kind of mission critical military SOFTWARE, is an idiot.
Because MSFT does not know the meaning of "mission critical".
Nor does it know the meaning of "customer service".
MSFT is the equivalent of General Motors "Chevy Vega" of the 1970's. As in: "it just might work for you for a while, but don't come complaining to us!"
Having worked for the Feds in contracting, it seems like Amazon worked the low channel to rig the contract proposal to favor their bid but the high (orange) channel let it be known that an Amazon award would be bad. If the award is overturned, Microsoft would have ample grounds to challenge the process. The lawyers feast tonight.
"it seems like Amazon worked the low channel to rig the contract proposal to favor their bid"
If by rigged, you mean built facilities to match DoD requirements with the intention of having an advantage for future contracts, then yes - you can call that rigged.
Or you can look it as game changing for the DoD where rather than forking out significant sums of money for services that maybe able to be delivered at some point in the future, the DoD could use available services with no significant upfront costs for the size of the contract. Microsoft realised the game had changed but were a little over 2 years behind standing up competing facilities. Oracle and IBM still believe that the DoD will pay them in the order of 5% of the contract value just to stand up services at some point in the future.
No, "rigged" as in "had 'ex-'employees involved in the specification writing process". Seriously, the spec was originally written such that only AWS and GCP had a chance at the deal--and by the time things had gotten serious, Alphabet had already signaled that it was too "pure" to engage in contracts with the DoD.
My experience with Google products in government contracting is that they are capable of meeting the contract requirements on a technical level, but they are completely unusable in implementation. We were forced to use Google Office products in place of MS Office on one contract I had the misadventure to work and it was painful on a number of levels. I do not know about cloud services as it is outside my area of expertise, but that has certainly colored my view of all things coming out of the Chocolate Factory.
There are things that Google gets very, very right (from a business standpoint), and then there is everything else.
They get networking very, very right. They get ads very, very right.
But GDocs is an excellent example of why everything is NOT an HTML document. For instance.
I have two concerns about G doing JEDI. 1) Security is NOT something that G has deeply embedded into its DNA. Quite the opposite, in fact. 2) There is a very strong anti-US and anti-military environment there, up and down the ladder. Yes, there are 30000 engineers, but getting the people who actually have the ability to do the thing AND want to do it right might be a lot harder than might be expected.
Amazed only one other person thought of the conflict of interest Amazon had in this.
More here: https://theintercept.com/2019/06/03/amazon-defense-department-jedi-contract/
You people who blindly are against anything Trump is for and vice versa had better hope he
doesn't come out in favor of breathing. He could be right, if only by accident, you know.
Not that I think MS is better than AWS at cloudy things. Neither deserves a single source contract.
Being sympathetic to the challenges of gov procurement, though, having more than one lets them all point fingers and run up the tab when their pieces don't work together. There's plenty of history on that one.
Perhaps the real story is that the government knows it lacks the competence to do this for itself - and doesn't deign to address fixing that in house. Which is a lose for all, as without that competence, it will fail in most of its goals anyway.
Or like one of the F35 failures, cede things like the IP involved to the contractors (the gov doesn't own the F35 IP! - it's not like they haven't shoveled out the bucks.).
"A Star Trek reference with a Babylon 5 picture just grates" - reactions like this one always make me imagine an El Reg hack channelling Leonard Nimoy
I hate to state the obvious to someone who has been around these parts since 2009, but if you look you will see that every article on El Reg about the JEDI contract is headed by dreadful punny headlines and misplaced images referencing any science fiction series you care to mention, except Star Wars. "Jedi" is, of course (sorry, sorry) a Star Wars "thing".
M.
B5, Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly.
Lots mentioned.
Seen bits of all, but still favourite is Trek.
I liked Firefly but the film ending upset me (Wash).
Wars, prequels, and the latest films seem odd.
Now when will ElReg channel a few other series?
And what will they be?
"dreadful punny headlines and misplaced images "
One persons dreadful puns and misplaced images is another persons droll humour and world class trolling that just gets funnier the longer goes on.
I do hope the writer remembered to buy shares in a scifi underwear producer early in the game. The way end get bunched up so often, I bet demand has soared...
You need to be a black-belt in reoccurring inside jokes to work around here.
It's partly to annoy pedants, and partly a send-up of publications (including El Reg TBF) that accidentally mix up pictures of TV shows, airplanes, battleships, old computers, actors, etc, in headlines and images.
C.
By "surprising everyone", you apparently missed what one clued-up (that is someone, no me who has extensive history with DoD contracts) commentard. When the first delay in awarding the contract was announced, he indicated that this was a sign that the preferred contractor had not come out on top, and confidently announced that AWS was out. Some months before the m$ contract was awarded.
I expect that there were a few thousand like him.
@Notas: As I posted last time someone made your comment:
"It's a long running joke on the topic of JEDI hereabouts - there hasn't been a Star Wars picture used yet, IIRC. Initially it played on the Star Wars/Star Trek conflation by those barbarians that don't care to know the difference, and now brings in B5. *We* all know the difference, and who starred in what... , but sometimes pretend not to."
FFS AWS still have a lead over microsoft, GCP is still behind, and thats the limit of people who could be the single vendor.
As was said, AWS were flexible enough to meet the requirements, and had enough of a revolving door policy with DoD to be on top of them
MS and G pulled out of the original race,
Larry and IBM kicked up a stink as they were losing the revenue from the current disjoined systems and weren't big enough to bid for the whole thing
This will not end anytime soon, meanwhile DoD will have to make do and mend what they have, which will keep Big Reb and Big Blue happy
This spat is mainly because Trump stepped in with this size 40's (before shoving them way down his throat again), and threw his toys out the pram because he hates Bezos. I personally think MS are one step away from the anti-christ too, but for a contract this large, if there's any sign of favoritism (or hateism) or under-the-table deals, it needs to be found out.
MS will just have to put champagne back in the cooler for a while longer
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