Oracle's in-house lawyer denied access to Uncle Sam's procurement docs in JEDI legal battle Oracle's in-house counsel has been denied access to sealed information in its legal battle over the Pentagon's $10bn cloud contract after a judge sided with AWS in what will be one of many smaller battles in the case. Big Red is suing the US Department of Defense over its decision to hand the mega-cloud contract, Joint …
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It is not that big of a feral contract in reality. The real issue is Leisure Suit Larry and his Minions have asleep at the switch and are late to the cloud game. While this would be nice contract for AWS or Azure neither needs it for credibility. Both are well known players in the cloud so are often invited to bid as a matter of course. I suspect they are often engaged in precontract technical discussions also that occur before a spec is even written. (A practice that is not all the uncommon with government contracts at all levels.) But Leisure Suit needs to a biggish contract with a big entity to give some real credibility as a cloud vendor. Thus, the minions' carping about probably losing the bid because in reality they are probably not competitive. Lose this contract and the minions do not have a big name client to bandy about.
Often in a major contract, the buyer will require an 'installation list' of customers using your equipment or service whom the buyer can contact. So a few very big name customers that are reasonably happy with you help your credibility with the buyer. Getting a good customer list is hard to do for someone late to the game. And often only prequalified vendors are allowed to bid. So if you cannot get on the bidder's list you bid will be rejected. So the minions being late probably do not have an impressive customer list, certainly nothing like AWS. And they are probably having problems convincing the contract officer they have the skills to handle the project (the importance of the customer list). Thus they are likely to be excluded from bidding while several others will be allowed to bid. I have experience with bidding capital equipment contracts with various governmental agencies and have seen the process first hand.
Some background on federal contract announcements: the value of the contract in the press release is the maximum permitted over the full contract term. It's not the expected revenue. Quite often the amount spent is substantially less. Somehow there never seems to be a press release that says "that $50M contract we talked about 5 years ago only resulted in $3M in revenue".
Well, one reason you don't see that in the news is that it doesn't happen? When was the last report of an underrun, in like, ever? That max is only theoretical, and everyone in the biz knows that.
a_yank_lurker has it right - I've been there too.
But for reference, from Google Finance, Amazon's gross from the last quarter alone was $56.58 billion.
That's one quarter...and for all of Amazon. I believe this contract is longer running and won't actually be super significant, though it is in the area that Amazon actually has a margin...
This compete-by-lawsuit wasn't begun by Oracle, but it's out of style enough that they might be signalling the end of it. Always late to the party and all that.
That's obviously something that needs to be restricted to a third party lawyer hired by Oracle, not an in-house lawyer who would use Oracle email addresses etc., so the information can be protected against disclosure to others in Oracle. Knowing what everyone else bid would be a huge advantage for them, the courts have to insure that cannot happen.
With lawyers needed due to Boeing suing every time they lose a contract bid and now this, how much longer can the DoD keep going?
Is this anything to do with them suddenly telling Croatia they can only have F16s with American avionics aboard - are they that short of a few dimes? I mean, I knew they'd wasted a lot of money that should have been spent on the armed forces in fighting Boeing over the tanker and helicopter contracts but has it really got that bad?
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