The U.S. Government Accountability Office has rejected a complaint from Oracle about the Pentagon’s cloud contract. This may have wide-ranging consequences, as it paves the way for contracting a single provider for the highly lucrative JEDI contract.
Two months ago, Oracle filed a complaint about the JEDI trial. The Pentagon wants to switch to the cloud and offers a contract with a value of 10 billion dollars. In addition, there is only one provider who can win the contract. As far as Oracle and several other cloud providers are concerned, there should be several parties.
All rejected
Oracle fears that the model in which the Pentagon selects only one provider is particularly good for competitor Amazon Web Services. That seems to be the main candidate for the cloud project. Of course, AWS is not the only one to compete for the contract, but it is the one with the best papers. For example, in 2014 the company won a 600 million dollar contract to build a cloud center for the CIA.
The GAO completely rejects Oracle’s three main arguments. This also includes the main claim – that the single contract winner structure is contrary to federal law. The GAO concludes that this is in line with the rules, especially since it is in the government’s interest, especially when it comes to security interests. And so the Pentagon is allowed to offer these kinds of contracts.
The GAO also rejects the argument that there was no reasonable support for all suppliers. The potential conflict of interest to which Oracle referred in third place is also ignored. This allows the Pentagon to continue its planning and search for one JEDI provider.
Major impacts
The decision of the GAO can have major consequences. IBM and Microsoft also indicated that they were concerned about the way in which the Pentagon wants to set up JEDI. There is a good chance that AWS will be the winner and will sign the ten-year, ten-billion-dollar contract. However, there is still a protest from IBM that is ongoing, to which the GAO has yet to respond.
In addition, several cloud providers can still go to the GAO, or even to court, if the Pentagon eventually chooses a company. Ultimately, the company that is allowed to execute the contract will have a big advantage: the papers it gets after executing a contract of this size, it will make a good provider for future similar projects.
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.