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Cloud The Military Government Oracle The Almighty Buck United States

Oracle On Why It Thinks AWS Winning Pentagon's $10 Billion Jedi Cloud Contract Stinks (theregister.co.uk) 116

Posted by BeauHD from the sore-loser dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Ahead of its first day in a U.S. federal claims court in Washington DC, Oracle has outlined its position against the Pentagon's award of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract to Amazon Web Services. Big Red's lengthy filing questions the basis of Uncle Sam's procurement procedure as well as Amazon's hiring of senior Department of Defense staff involved in that procurement process. Oracle's first day in court is set for 10 July. The JEDI deal could be worth up to $10 billion over 10 years. The Department of Defense handed the contract to AWS after deciding that only Amazon and Microsoft could meet the minimum security standards required in time.

Oracle's filing said that U.S. "warfighters and taxpayers have a vested interest in obtaining the best services through lawful, competitive means... Instead, DoD (with AWS's help) has delivered a conflict-ridden mess in which hundreds of contractors expressed an interest in JEDI, over 60 responded to requests for information, yet only the two largest global cloud providers can clear the qualification gates." The company said giving JEDI, with its "near constant technology refresh requirements", to just one company was in breach of procurement rules. It accused the DoD of gaming the metrics used in the process to restrict competition for the contract. Oracle also accused Amazon of breaking the rules by hiring two senior DoD staff, Deap Ubhi and Anthony DeMartino, who were involved in the JEDI procurement process. Ubhi is described as "lead PM." A third name is redacted in the publicly released filing. The DoD, which is expected to make an offer to settle the case in late August, said in a statement: "We anticipate a court decision prior to that time. The DoD will comply with the court's decision. While the acquisition and litigation processes are proceeding independently the JEDI implementation will be subject to the determination of the court."

The 50-page filing can be found here (PDF).
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Oracle On Why It Thinks AWS Winning Pentagon's $10 Billion Jedi Cloud Contract Stinks More

Oracle On Why It Thinks AWS Winning Pentagon's $10 Billion Jedi Cloud Contract Stinks

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  • fuck oracle (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @04:52PM (#58863196)

    fuck oracle fuck oracle fuck oracle

    • we want an license per troop and per vehicle and officers are troops as well. Even the POTUS

      • Nah, you are thinking way too small on licensing.

        License per wheel. Discount if you license per axle. Tanks have special licensing per tread. Aircraft have even more complicated licensing. Troops get licensing per equipment although discounts are available for extra boots/dress uniforms and so forth. Pay our Licensing Consultant more money just to determine that you owe us even more money.

      • Re: we want an license per troop and per vehicle a (Score:4, Funny)

        by orlanz ( 882574 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @07:06PM (#58863838)

        Officers are not troops. They are special units that need access to a premier technical support number. It's the same people as regular support but these can send to the support+1, if requested, and without a manager sign off! Every officer needs two such numbers. One to escalate on if the first doesn't pass on if requested.

        Support+1 are folks who have stuck around for atleast 6 months.

    • Re:fuck oracle (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @05:00PM (#58863244) Journal

      Indeed! Oracle motto: "When you can't win via merit, win via lawsuits."

      They F'd up Java, MySql, their cloud sales numbers, and everything else they touch. They even make M$ look good in comparison, which takes honed skill in dickery.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Actually, it looks like MySQL is doing pretty damn well to me. What am I missing here, other than that it's not MariaDB, which is a mess?

        • looks like MySQL is doing pretty damn well to me. What am I missing here, other than that it's not MariaDB, which is a mess?

          MySql vs. MariaDB flamewar to begin in 3...2...1...

        • Re:fuck oracle (Score:5, Interesting)

          by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @07:13PM (#58863860)

          The licensing is a mess, Oracle isn't fixing core issues or developing MySQL 5 out and MySQL 8 won't have many 'interesting' features if you're not paying for an enterprise license.

          Also, the commercial edition went from $599 to now over $5000 for 'up to' 4 cores.

      • It takes a colossal (reason, screw-up, personal self-conscious vendetta, take your pick) thing to ruin Sun Microsystems. Oracle has those chops no doubt.

        • McNeely ruined Sun, which is why Larry was able to buy it cheap.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by hoofie ( 201045 )

            Nope - Linux in the Enterprise killed Sun and especially when Oracle certified the DB on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

            Within a few months all of our Sun equipment bar one little server had been removed and replaced with Oracle on RedHat.

            The costs savings were just too big to ignore.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @07:15PM (#58863872)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • To that, may I add... Fuck Oracle Sideways with a Bandsaw.

  • Still, if Oracle had won... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @04:57PM (#58863228)

    it would have been a $20B contract.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      it would have been a $20B contract.

      What was that acronym for Oracle again?

      One
      Rich
      A
      Called
      Larry
      Ellison

      Something like that. Seriously, with the way they are making Java terms unfriendly and well everything else, I'd avoid Oracle at, well most costs, particularly if my project had a very long timeline.

      C# is better anyway. And as far as Oracle's DB goes, well it is of course powerful and all that, but not being locked to oracle's DB is so much nicer. I'm reminded of when Vader changed the terms of a deal. I believe it went something like "Pra

    • $20B

      before extensions and further lawsuits on why its now $35B

  • Wait - “Big Red”? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @05:00PM (#58863240)

    Does anyone actually call Oracle that, or is it simply “we want a cool nickname” wishful thinking on Oracle’s part? Sorta like when George Constanza tried to get everyone to call him T-Bone?

    I’ve never heard “Big Red” used before unless people were talking about a cream soda.

  • JEDI is a buzzword that was stale by the early 2000s. If you want to be hot these days, you're a Software Wizard or Software Parsel Tongue, speaking the magic language of software. Whatever you do, don't call yourself a Hufflepuff software dev, those are marshmallows (and probably all do .NET).

  • As a former Oracle employee, I'm not surprised. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @05:02PM (#58863270)
    Larry howls every time someone gets a cookie he hasn't already taken a big bite out of and slobbered all over. AWS is the 10,000 pound gorilla - why should they have chosen the 9,000 pound red one? If the decision was made on the stupid basis of "size = stability" then AWS wins. Period. Oracle does a huge hosting business, but not *that* huge. IMHO, hosting this kind of thing is dumb anyway. It should be kept in-house and managed in house by people who are directly accountable for the security of the data. I've worked in hosting nearly 2/3rds of my career and I can tell you the dirty little secret: it's cheaper and better to do it yourself just about damn near always unless you are so small IT is only a fraction of your business cost (less than a headcount).

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Hosting has become the equivalent of McDonald's: You know what you'll get. Businesses don't like individuality. Your one man do-it-yourself IT department may be cheaper and may even be more secure and whatnot, but it also has a bus factor of 1, and there is a very high probability that someone else can't take over if that should come into play. Standardization is what drives people to the cloud, not pricing.

      • Re:As a former Oracle employee, I'm not surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @06:10PM (#58863630)

        Then don't go to AWS... At it's core, it's a XEN running hypervisor, but that's not how AWS really makes it's money. They charge for every jot and tittle that you need. Oh? You need a public IP, well those are a dollar a day to go on top of that tiny $0.50/hour ($12/day) instance. But that's just CPU and memory, you need disk space? Cough up another few pennies a gigabit for disk space. Oh? You want to TRANSFER data $$, keep backups $$, automatically scale to demand $$. Oh and you should be using our SQL database, it's cheaper than paying licenses but we collect $$ for that. Seriously, AWS nickel dimes you to death after they suck you in with those low per/hour virtual machines.

        The problem here is that they are NOT standardizing on any kind of standard. They are buying all these specialized, limited to AWS, services that I can tell Amazon is going to charge a lot more for in the future. It's how Amazon works, Be the cost leader, differentiate your product or service to get your customer locked in while breaking even, then jack the prices up when they are committed to your service and cannot easily afford to switch.

        IMHO - Eventually they will be sucking the DOD budget dry... Trust me.

        • Then don't go to AWS... At it's core, it's a XEN running hypervisor

          You seem to be describing only EC2. And that is out-of-date by years. EC2's current platforms are KVM-based hardware-assisted hypervisor with custom IO acceleration hardware.

          , but that's not how AWS really makes it's money. They charge for every jot and tittle that you need. Oh? You need a public IP, well those are a dollar a day to go on top of that tiny $0.50/hour ($12/day) instance.

          Elastic IPs are charged for when not attached to a running instance. They are free when attached to that cheap running instance. See https://aws.amazon.com/premium... [amazon.com]

          If you have your own IPs (from a RIR that supports the required features), you can use them at no additional cost, see BYoIP.

          Why does AWS charge for elastic IPv4 IPs? Becau

    • I've worked in hosting nearly 2/3rds of my career and I can tell you the dirty little secret: it's cheaper and better to do it yourself just about damn near always unless you are so small IT is only a fraction of your business cost (less than a headcount).

      I would have agreed a year ago, but even then we both would have been wrong. The "serverless" approach completely changed my mind. It isn't all roses, but mostly, and much more-so than self-hosting.

  • Their salesdroids are the worst.

  • Oracle:

    You and your licensing stinks.

    Sincerely,
    DOD

    PS: kisses!

  • Oracle is becoming less relevant by the day. This is just another sign of that. "It's always gonna be sour grapes with you boy..."

  • Um ... (Score:3)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @05:46PM (#58863492)

    Oracle On Why It Thinks AWS Winning Pentagon's $10 Billion Jedi Cloud Contract Stinks

    Because Oracle didn't win the contract and get the opportunity to pillage and plunder the US taxpayer?

  • You are smarting because you did not get the contract. That's all. You can wrap it in impressive words, but that's what it boils down to.

  • Business as usual (Score:3)

    by tomhath ( 637240 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @06:01PM (#58863576)
    Protests after an award that size are to be expected, pretty much every time. Nothing to see here.
  • I have been mildly following this story for some time. Namely because my staff and I developed a system in 2009 called JED - Joint Enterprise Development Infrastructure - for Los Angeles County. (It was all in-house development.)

    The problem here is that DOJ made a decision based on their criteria. I know from experience that vendors seem to think a protest will get them somewhere. Yet all it does is delay projects and pull good staff away from their work. Oracle should just suck it up and defer to AWS. I

  • Does Oracle do anything but fling lawsuits around? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sydin ( 2598829 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @06:07PM (#58863616)

    I swear they used to be a technology company...

  • This is just how the game is played these days. Big contracts are nearly ALWAYS protested even if the contracting agency does everything right.

    This is exactly what happened to the KC-135 replacement tanker TWICE, before Boeing actually got to build some airplanes. The first round, the whole thing got thrown out under protest. It was re-competed, new bids submitted and another contract award made. The loser then filed ANOTHER protest, which was not upheld by the courts. However in the end, the first bi

    • Re:Standard Proceedure (Score:5, Informative)

      by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @07:00PM (#58863812)

      The KC-135 tanker replacement contract is a little more convoluted than you make it out to be - there were at least three competitions...

      1. In 2002, Boeing was originally chosen as sole supplier of KC-767 tankers on lease to the USAF in a deal that would cost the USAF more in leasing costs than it would to buy the aircraft. This was contested by Senator McCain.

      2. Boeing and Airbus were then invited to submit bids for a purchase of tankers in 2003, which Boeing won. This was subsequently contested, and it was discovered that a DoD procurement staffer had passed on Airbuses bid to Boeing in return for a job at Boeing. She went to prison, the Boeing CTO went to prison, another Boeing COO was fired, and Boeing was fined more than $600Million. Boeing contract was cancelled.

      3. Boeing and Airbus were then invited to submit bids for a purchase of tankers in 2007. Airbus won, Boeing contested, the contract was overturned.

      4. Boeing and Airbus were then invited to submit bids for a purchase of tankers in 2009, and Boeing was awarded the contract in 2011. Airbus decided not to protest, citing that Boeings bid was "very, very, very aggressive" and "much lower than we would have gone." Boeing was to deliver the first aircraft in 2013 - they actually delivered the first aircraft in 2019, and their entire KC-46 program is massively over budget. Deliveries of the KC-46 were halted in April 2019 due to debris being found in the fuel tanks of delivered aircraft.

      In this case, the "game" you deride turned out to be very correct - corruption, prison sentences, massive fines, low balling, massive cost and time overruns, sloppy manufacturing etc etc etc. Sure, the original bidder won, but the end cost wasn't due to the loser contesting...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ecuador ( 740021 )

        I think the only addition to that post for even more clarity is that Airbus was partnered with Northrop Grumman for the contract. I don't think a non-US company could submit a bid by themselves... Otherwise fine summary ;)

        • Airbus partnered with NG for the first two contract bids in 2003 and 2007, but went it alone in 2009. There was *massive* anti-Airbus sentiment when they won the 2007 contract, including US politicians stating a foreign company should never win such a contract (despite them also pushing for Boeing to win contracts overseas...), which is why NG declined to partner again and why Airbus declined to contest the 2011 award (Airbus infact had to be persuaded to even bid in 2009, they very nearly declined to ente

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Ecuador ( 740021 )

            Ha. I had assumed there was a requirement somewhere about having a US company in the bid. So theoretically at least it is not needed. Thanks for the info.

            • There is mainly due to management having to see reports and those reports being classified so they have to get clearances.
              So what companies do is split into a new division or subsidy, which for Airbus is the USA company Airbus Group inc. HQ is in Virginia.
              You also have instances like the old Sun Microsystem, a US company, that had to form a new subsidy because the founders and executive officers are citizens of other countries.

      • Still, the game is to protest, everything, especially if it's a big contract. It's a gambit to be sure and the protest process exists for a reason (as evidenced by the Tanker contracts) but contractors play this card on the flimsiest of evidence. I'm saying that Oracle is playing a game. Do they have a valid complaint? I doubt it, but that's for the courts to decide.

        My point is that we now pretty much COUNT on protests in the procurement process now. It's part of the cost of letting contracts these da

        • The tanker protest accomplished quite a lot, actually.

          The first protest ensured that Boeing didn't rip off the USAF with overpriced single sources leased tankers.

          The second protest ensured that criminal activity was not rewarded and the bidding process was fair.

          The third protest ensured ... not that much really. If your point was correct, this is where it should have ended - with Airbus getting the contract and Boeing walking away. However, the third protest ensured that Boeing ultimately won a contract i

  • Cried Larry... I want another boat! Waaaaaaa....

  • 50 Page Filing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @06:47PM (#58863764)

    50 pages to say "I wanted that money!"?

    • No, no....fifty pages ALL saying he wanted that money.
      The be sure the reader fully understands his position.
  • Running the Pentagon out of the dirty Amazon cloud? Will this work as well as Boeing outsourcing their software development?

  • "Because it's not us."

  • Because the Government isn't sending enough truckloads of cash to them already.

    Never the less, AWS is a very big waste of money. It's really stupid of them to use AWS for the military.

  • From the TFA:

    The JEDI deal could be worth up to $10bn over 10 years. The Department of Defense handed the contract to AWS after deciding that only Amazon and Microsoft could meet the minimum security standards required in time.

    I get all the Oracle hate, and I'm right on board with it too. My employer uses the ironically named Oracle product, "Agile", which is about as agile as a turtle with three broken legs. It's hideous, bloated crapware with a user interface that would suck by 90's standards.

    But as a taxpayer, I am also equally concerned with the incredibly low security standards the DoD must be using that puts Microsoft as a "qualified" vendor for this contract. Everyone knows that Microsoft and the word "securit

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