Slashdot Mirror
Oracle Challenges Pentagon's $10 Billion Cloud Computing Contract (theregister.co.uk)
Oracle has filed an official complaint with the U.S. government over plans to award the Pentagon's lucrative cloud contract to a single vendor. Rebecca Hill writes via The Register: The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, which has a massive scope, covering different levels of secrecy and classification across all branches of the military, will run for a maximum of 10 years and is worth a potential $10 billion. In spite of this pressure from vendors and the tech lobby -- as well as concerns from Congress -- the US Department of Defense (DoD) refused to budge, and launched a request for proposals (RFP) at the end of last month. Oracle is less than impressed with the Pentagon's failure to back down, and this week filed a bid protest to congressional watchdog the Government Accountability Office asking for the RFP to be amended.
In the protest, the database goliath sets out its arguments against a single vendor award -- broadly that it could damage innovation, competition, and security. Reading between the lines, it doesn't want either of Amazon or Microsoft or Google to get the whole pie to itself, and thus endanger Oracle's cosiness with Uncle Sam. Summing up its position in a statement to The Register, Oracle said that JEDI "virtually assures DoD will be locked into legacy cloud for a decade or more" at a time when cloud technology is changing at an unprecedented pace.
In the protest, the database goliath sets out its arguments against a single vendor award -- broadly that it could damage innovation, competition, and security. Reading between the lines, it doesn't want either of Amazon or Microsoft or Google to get the whole pie to itself, and thus endanger Oracle's cosiness with Uncle Sam. Summing up its position in a statement to The Register, Oracle said that JEDI "virtually assures DoD will be locked into legacy cloud for a decade or more" at a time when cloud technology is changing at an unprecedented pace.
I fundamentally dislike Oracle. Its an exploitative company that functions purely on ensnaring companies into deals that are far too costly then using legal shenanigans to stop them to leave.
BUT, they are right here. Giving the whole contract , all ten billion of it, to a single contractor (And lets be clear here, its either AWS or Azure. Google are capable, but they dont have the govt mojo to compete in this space) is straight up monopoly building, and it creates a single point of vunerability to the DODs systems. By splitting things up over multiple providers, it enhances competition, and divides up responsibility in a way better suited to national security.
And after all, they could still write "NO ORACLES ALLOWED" in it, right. (Well probably not, but hey)
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
We need to drill deeper than simply reporting on Oracle's protest, and the politics behind it.
An independent body of security experts should study the Pentagon's use of the cloud in the first place. Simply by moving to cloud computing, the Pentagon is revealing that they underestimate the cyber espionage capabilities of enemy states, and as in the case of Islamic State or Al Qaeda, stateless enemies.
The same independent body should also study vulnerabilities inherent in military use of the cloud. In an all out war, the enemy first tries to neutralize the command and control infrastructure of their enemy (us). Simply by using the cloud, we are offering the enemy a single neck to chop off, connecting the brain to the body. A secure military force requires so much redundancy, that the enemy has too many necks to chop off to be a feasible strategy.
This is the first news about Oracle doing something that I think might not be evil that I have seen.
Being right is not the same as being good. Oracle is right, but for reasons of pure self-interest. They got a late start in cloud services, lack scale, and are still sucking hind tit, so they have no hope of getting a big winner-takes-all contract. If they can force the DoD to break it up, they have a good chance of getting some portion today, and even more in coming years.
Dead company walking. They just don't realize it.
Their clients hate Oracle. If they could, they've fire them today.
Oracle has been a bully, especially on cloudy stuff.