Government denies Oracle’s protest of $10B Pentagon JEDI cloud RFP
When Oracle filed a protest in August with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI RFP process was unfair, it probably had little chance of succeeding. Today, the GAO turned away the protest.
The JEDI contract has been set up as a winner-take-all affair. With $10 billion on the table, there has been much teeth-gnashing and complaining that the deck has been stacked to favor one vendor, Amazon. The Pentagon has firmly denied this, but it hasn’t stopped Oracle and IBM from complaining loudly from the get-go that there were problems with the way the RFP was set up.
At least with the Oracle complaint, the GAO put that idea firmly to rest today. For starters, the GAO made it clear that the winner-take-all approach was just fine, stating “…the Defense Department’s decision to pursue a single-award approach to obtain these cloud services is consistent with applicable statutes (and regulations) because the agency reasonably determined that a single-award approach is in the government’s best interests for various reasons, including national security concerns, as the statute allows.”
The statement went on to say that the GAO didn’t find that the Pentagon favored any vendor during the RFP period. “GAO’s decision also concludes that the Defense Department provided reasonable support for all of the solicitation provisions that Oracle contended exceeded the agency’s needs.” Finally, the GAO found no evidence of conflict of interest on the DOD’s part as Oracle had suggested.
Oracle has been unhappy since the start of this process, going so far as having co-CEO Safra Catz steer her complaints directly to the president in a meeting last April long before the RFP period had even opened.
As I wrote in an article in September, Oracle was not the only vendor to believe that Amazon was the favorite:
The belief amongst the various other players, is that Amazon is in the driver’s seat for this bid, possibly because they delivered a $600 million cloud contract for the government in 2013, standing up a private cloud for the CIA. It was a big deal back in the day on a couple of levels. First of all, it was the first large-scale example of an intelligence agency using a public cloud provider. And of course the amount of money was pretty impressive for the time, not $10 billion impressive, but a nice contract.
Regardless, the RFP submission period ended last month. The Pentagon is expected to choose the vendor in April 2019, Oracle’s protest notwithstanding.