IBM Suspended From US Federal Contracts 136
theodp writes "IBM has been temporarily banned from receiving future contracts with federal agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed on Monday. The suspension went into effect last Thursday due to 'concerns raised about potential activities involving an EPA procurement,' the agency said in an e-mailed statement. Under a reciprocal agreement among federal agencies, when one issues a ban, the others follow it. The EPA said it will not comment further on the matter. An IBM spokesman said he had no immediate comment. 'You don't see this very often, particularly for large companies,' commented a stunned industry analyst, mentioning a bankrupt MCI as a notable exception. IBM earned an estimated $1.5 billion in revenue from federal prime contracts in fiscal 2007."
Re:Tags (Score:5, Interesting)
attack on Open Source? (Score:1, Interesting)
Haliburton (Score:4, Interesting)
OOXML Bitch Slap (Score:1, Interesting)
Imagine how IBM's investors will feel about this news.
With OOXML looking like its scraping through ISO, surely this is a Redmond-inspired powerplay to remind IBM that they need to start toeing the line or be crushed.
For me there is a clear message in this announcement. Its not a coincidence.
Re:Not a hoax, not a joke. (Score:1, Interesting)
Same AC from the parent on this thread.
Don't worry too much about IBM just yet. From TFA, they get about $1.7B in revenue from federal contracts each year, but this equates to 1% of IBM's annual revenue. The other 99% is still just dandy. They'll make it along just fine.
In theory, if the company is gaming contract competition, then that is detrimental to the efficient spending of government money, which is in turn bad for taxpayers. And I appreciate your sympathy for IBM's tax-paying employees, but far more American taxpayers are *not* IBM employees than are, so if this is in fact about some sinister anti-competitive/bribing kind of activity, then it should be a Good Thing.
The problem is that so far EPA and IBM have been totally mum about what's going on, so we have no idea if this is worth it. We in the other agencies - who are bound by the reciprocal agreement - are in the position of having to do a lot of sudden shifting to work IBM out of our project plans and enterprise architecture. It sucks a lot of billable hours, and so I am really questioning if this is going to have a net positive effect on the "taxpayer" because of the work it has already generated.
That said, I don't think there's anything wrong with EPA acting as "judge, jury and executioner" in this case. The agency has an incidental tasking of being careful and efficient with taxpayer dollars as it carries out its main duties. If they felt they'd been had, they were right to blow the whistle. This isn't court; no rights were abrogated. IBM does not have much more right to compete for government projects than Walmart has a right to sell you potato chips - they have a right to offer, but you are not bound to accept.
A remedy is in process; the investigation is underway and we'll find out more, I'm sure. I hope it all clears up soon - I like working with IBM, so far - but it's gonna take time to tell.
How backward. (Score:0, Interesting)
IBM is banned but squeaky clean M$ gets a pass and ISO certification. I suppose the EPA needed to make room in it's budget for Vista, new word processors and the supercomputers required to run them. The Bush administration has zero credibility in technical and scientific matters but this is a staggering new low.
You have the suck backwards too. IBM will miss 1% of their revenue much less that taxpayers will miss their services. The last time I looked, IBM was delivering product people wanted. What's going to take it's place? Dell servers running vapor and Windows 7? What nuts.