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Amazon, Microsoft wage war over the Pentagon's 'war cloud':
Amazon and Microsoft are battling it out over a $10 billion opportunity to build the U.S. military its first "war cloud" computing system. But Amazon's early hopes of a shock-and-awe victory may be slipping away.
Formally called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure plan, or JEDI, the military's computing project would store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the Pentagon to use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities. The Defense Department hopes to award the winner-take-all contract as soon as August. Oracle and IBM were eliminated at an earlier round of the contract competition.
But that's only if the project isn't derailed first. It faces a legal challenge by Oracle and growing congressional concerns about alleged Pentagon favoritism toward Amazon. Military officials hope to get started soon on what will be a decade-long business partnership they describe as vital to national security.
"This is not your grandfather's internet," said Daniel Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a defense-oriented think tank. "You're talking about a cloud where you can go from the Pentagon literally to the soldier on the battlefield carrying classified information."
Amazon was considered an early favorite when the Pentagon began detailing its cloud needs in 2017, but its candidacy has been marred by an Oracle allegation that Amazon executives and the Pentagon have been overly cozy. Oracle has a final chance to make its case against Amazon - and the integrity of the government's bidding process - in a court hearing Wednesday.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday July 11 2019, @11:05AM
The results of these major procurement contracts are always the same: The losers claim some irregularity, and tie the program in knots for years. Sometimes they managed to force a new competition, sometimes not. Regardless, the result is years of costs for nothing at all.
To take another example: Consider the KC-46 program. The initial idea in 2003 was to simply hand the contract to Boeing. This led to a corruption scandal.
So they issued an RFP (request for proposal - the start of a competition) in 2006, and the contract was awarded to...not Boeing. Boeing protested and forced an "expedited recompetition". Boeing tried to change the terms of the competition midstream, and as a result the whole thing was cancelled.
A completely fresh start with a new RFP was issued in 2009. Three bids were received; one was disqualified for arriving 5 minutes late. The others, well, somehow each competetor was sent a preliminary copy of the other competitor's bid. Finally, the two remaining bidders submitted final proposals in 2011. Boeing won the competition.
So it took 8 years in order to award a contract for an aircraft. Along the way, at least two people were jailed for corruption (trying to force the contract to go to Boeing). Eight years and probably thousands of person-years of work later and...the contract went to Boeing.
There is something fundamentally broken in military procurement. From TFA: we now have Amazon, Microsoft and possible Oracle fighting over this enormous contract. The names of the players change, but the problems remain exactly the same...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.