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IBM protests against the idea of the U.S. Department of Defense to make one company fully responsible for its transition to the cloud. Within the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, one company receives a ten-year contract that is worth ten billion dollars.

But more and more companies seem to disagree. Now, following Oracle’s example, IBM is protesting against the requirements of JEDI. First of all, IBM disagrees with the idea of a single cloud provider and argues that certain requirements are to the advantage of a single provider. JEDI’s main error lies in its mandate for a single cloud environment for ten years, says Sam Gordy, IBM’s general manager in a blog post.

Limited competition

Gordy writes that the Pentagon restricts competition by imposing certain requirements that mirror the internal processes of a single provider, or mandates unnecessary possibilities. Gordy finds the latter particularly problematic, because the Pentagon wants to oblige the requirements for the registration deadline. IBM would rather see the Pentagon not make the requirements mandatory until work on JEDI begins.

Such rigid requirements are only mandatory for one reason, namely to arbitrarily limit the bidders, according to Gordy. Concerns have been expressed about this on several occasions, but the Pentagon would not have done anything to address these concerns.

A lot of protest

The company awarded the contract will help the U.S. Department of Defense build a single business cloud to store classified information and help the federal government consolidate its data centers. In addition to IBM, Amazon also offers Web Services on the JEDI contract, as well as Oracle, Microsoft and Google.

Earlier this week, Google decided not to compete for JEDI because it does not have certain certifications. Apart from that, Google, Oracle and Microsoft have already protested against the Pentagon’s idea of choosing only one provider. Oracle protested on August 6 and Google stated that it would bid if the contract applied to multiple providers.

IBMs Gordy concludes his blog by stating that by choosing only one provider, the Pentagon would only give malicious people one target to establish themselves if they wanted to undermine the military IT backbone. Dana Deasy, the Pentagon CIO in charge of the Washington Post on the JEDI deal, states that several cloud providers would make the whole too complex.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.