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Yesterday, the Pentagon announced two finalists for the $ 10 billion JEDI cloud contract process – and Oracle was not one of them. Despite legal proceedings, official protests and even criticism of the president, the two finalists are Microsoft and Amazon.
"After evaluating all the proposals received, the Department of Defense determined the scope of the Request for Proposals for Defense Infrastructure Cloud Joint Venture, in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations. The two companies in the competitive group will be more involved in the buying process, "TechCrunch Elissa Smith, spokesperson for the Department of Defense for the Department of Public Affairs, told TechCrunch. She added that these two finalists were actually Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS, the branch of cloud computing in Amazon).
This procurement process has attracted the attention of the cloud computing market for a number of reasons. First of all, it's a big sum of money, but the most important reason that cloud computing companies have become crazy is perhaps that it's a winning proposition to all.
It is important to keep in mind that, whether it is Microsoft or Amazon that is ultimately selected for this contract, the winner will never receive $ 10 billion and will not may not last 10 years because there are a number of points on which the DoD could go back, but the idea of a single winner has been tedious for the participants in the process from the beginning.
In the past year, Google has abandoned the race, while IBM and Oracle complained to anyone that the deal mistakenly favored Amazon. Others have questioned the opportunity to take a single-vendor approach. Even with $ 10 billion, astronomically, we pointed out that in the case of cloud computing, it's not so much money, but that money is at stake here.
We think here that the winner could have control over other government contracts, that this is an entry into a much larger pot of money. After all, if you build the cloud for the Department of Defense and prepare it for a modern, highly secure IT approach, you would be very well positioned to defend other contracts with similar requirements.
In the end, despite the protests of the other companies involved, the Pentagon probably got that right. The two finalists are the most qualified to meet the requirements of the contract. These are the two leading cloud infrastructure providers on the market, although Microsoft is far behind with 13 or 14 percent market share. Amazon is far with about 33%, according to several companies that follow such things.
Microsoft in particular has tools and resources that would be very appealing, especially Azure Stack, a mini private version of Azure, that you can defend anywhere, an approach that would have great appeal for you. However, both companies have experience with government contracts, and both bring strengths and weaknesses to the table. This will undoubtedly be a difficult decision.
In February, the contract took another turn when the ministry announced that it was investigating new evidence of conflict of interest from a former Amazon employee involved in the RFP process for a period of time. before returning to society. Smith reports that the ministry has found no such conflict, but that he could consider certain violations of ethics.
"The department's investigation determined that the integrity of the acquisition process had no negative impact. However, the investigation also revealed potential ethical violations, which were then referred to the DOD IG, "Smith explained.
The DoD is supposed to announce the winner this month, but the drama continues unabated.
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