The JEDI war: Amazon, Oracle and IBM battle in mysterious world of military contracts
Some of the biggest companies in tech are fighting with the U.S. government over questionable practices in the mysterious world of military contracts, with a lucrative prize at the end: a hefty $10 billion, multi-year cloud-computing deal.
At stake is a highly publicized but controversial contract to provide cloud services for the Department of Defense, dubbed Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. The contract received interest from the top cloud-computing players, many of which submitted bids for the deal: Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Web Services, IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Oracle Corp.
The plans call for the JEDI program to become the key component for the DOD’s enterprise cloud strategy, the DOD’s chief information officer, Dana Deasy, said in a letter to potential cloud partners. The JEDI cloud will serve as the infrastructure spanning from the DOD offices at the Pentagon to soldiers in the field. As opposed to a vast set of incompatible databases that they have in the field now, the deal envisions a unified cloud providing access to data through a range of devices to make decisions on the fly, using machine learning.
While the goal is admirable, the process and plans have been questioned by some contenders. Amid the acronyms and the mind-numbing jargon of both the DOD and the cloud industry, at least two cloud rivals, with the support of two members of Congress, have said that the request for proposal, or RFP, process appears to be flawed because it is going against industry practices by seeking only one cloud provider. They also believe that the language of the program appears to be tailored to one company alone: Amazon’s AWS.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-jedi-war-amazon-oracle-and-ibm-battle-in-mysterious-world-of-military-contracts-2019-01-07
