Amazon has a lot of enemies in the Pentagon cloud deal

The coalition of companies battling Amazon for a lucrative IT deal at the Pentagon is far larger than previously announced, indicating efforts to prevent the exclusive work of the world's largest cloud service provider.

SAP America, the SCRA unit of General Dynamics Corp., Red Hat Inc. and VMware Inc. are part of at least nine companies that have coordinated their opposition to the award of the contract by the government to a single provider, according to emails obtained by Bloomberg News. Amazon, the market leader in cloud services, is widely seen as the favorite.

The most active members of the coalition trying to fend off an Amazon win are Oracle, Microsoft and International Business Machines, according to two people close to the issue. Other companies involved include Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard, reported Bloomberg.

SAP and others are not considered the main contenders for the contract, but companies are banding together to fight the Pentagon's plans to award it to a single bidder for the sake of disrupting their business model set for obtaining military contracts.

The Pentagon announced a win-win contest for the multi-billion dollar cloud services contract in March. It has since suspended the bidding process for the project, which would transfer massive amounts of data from the Department of Defense to a commercially operated cloud system. The government said it still plans to award the contract by September.

Representatives from SAP, Red Hat, CSRA and VMware declined to comment.

The growing interest of tech companies to lobby the Pentagon to change its supply approach indicates the importance of the lucrative contract for cloud providers who are struggling to catch up with Amazon as well as businesses that sell software and other technologies to federal agencies.

The companies have begun discussions on joint tendering for the contract known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, according to two other people familiar with the discussions.

The Pentagon has appealed to Dana Deasy for being its new information director and the charge of overseeing the contract, an initiative that has been hailed by coalition members, according to two other people familiar with their thinking.

"Dana Deasy is a revolutionary, highly professional and experienced CIO who will lead DoD's technology efforts with distinction," said Ken Glueck, Senior Vice President of Oracle, in a statement.

Coalition members were pleased with Deasy's comments to the House Oversight and Reform Committee in May, people said. Although he did not specifically address the JEDI contract, he spoke of the importance of using multiple cloud providers.

Mr. Deasy previously held the position of global chief information officer for JPMorgan Chase & Co. at a time when the company has made significant investments to move to a public cloud. He has held similar positions within North American General Motors, Tyco International and Siemens AG in North America.

"Under Deasy's leadership, the department will gradually consolidate its disparate networks, data centers and cloud-based efforts to manage them at the enterprise level," Pentagon spokeswoman Heather Babb said Monday. .

To advance their agenda, technology allies have developed email and phone strategies, courting trade and traditional media and lobby lawmakers, defense officials and the White House, Bloomberg reported.

The coalition of competitive clouds has won some victories. The House committee on federal spending approved this month a bill banning the financing of the contract by the Ministry of Defense until the Pentagon submits a strategy to compete and use several cloud service providers. . The House of Commons has to measure spending this week.

– Ben Brody of Bloomberg, Tony Capaccio and Roxana Tiron contributed.