Oracle On Why It Thinks AWS Winning Pentagon's $10 Billion Jedi Cloud Contract Stinks (theregister.co.uk) 116
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).
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).
fuck oracle (Score:5, Insightful)
fuck oracle fuck oracle fuck oracle
we want an license per troop and per vehicle and o (Score:3)
we want an license per troop and per vehicle and officers are troops as well. Even the POTUS
Thinking too small with licensing (Score:3, Funny)
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)
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)
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.
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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?
Re:f*ck oracle (Score:1)
MySql vs. MariaDB flamewar to begin in 3...2...1...
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error need to 2 keys turned at the same time to start flame war.
Re:fuck oracle (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Re: fuck oracle (Score:1)
McNeely ruined Sun, which is why Larry was able to buy it cheap.
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Solaris was doing pretty well until Oracle took over. Sun would be ruling the cloud if it hadn't sold out. Sure, they had some seriously dodgy C-level executives but their storage, fault monitoring, clustering and virtualization/containerization was top notch while they were still marketing out the word 'cloud'.
Linux killed traditional *nix (Score:3)
Sun ... their storage, fault monitoring, clustering and virtualization/containerization was top notch while ...
... while they lost more and more share to Linux running on more commoditized hardware. Sun was successful because, pre-Linux pre-FreeBSD, where would one go for *nix boxes?
I got to watch the transition from the university side of things. Many Sun users were migrated to PCs running Linux. A very very small handful were able to justify a need for the more specialized Sun hardware and got to stick with Suns. Most just needed a decent *nix box. I expect a similar thing happened on the server side. Too many
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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.
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>today i've spent half of my day waiting for java compiler.
I call bullshit on this. Either you have a crappy build system setup (and I've seen horrible ones) or you're just hating on Java because you don't like working with it. I've worked on some massively large Java projects with dozens of independent modules and no compile ever took half a day.
Re:fuck oracle (Score:5, Funny)
God damn you people. Uncle Larry only owns ONE Hawaiian island; how will he ever stop being poor and catch up with Bezos with closed minds like yourselves slagging him down?
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Let's slice it off from the USA and call it "Lawyerstan", "Suestan", or "Litigioustan".
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Let's slice it off from the USA and call it "Lawyerstan", "Suestan", or "Litigioustan".
Just nuke it from orbit, when the winds will take the fallout away from the other islands.
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No, Oracle made the guidance system.
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AWS is based on open source where they have wrapped their own infrastructure around it to manage customers, isolate networking and figure out how to bill customers for every nickel dime service they offer. You are free to roll your own and compete with Amazon, I personally see many possible ways to offer reasonable services at better prices than AWS offers, I'm just not so sure it's worth it..
IMHO - I fear both Amazon AND Oracle in this market space. Both are too big and cannot be effectively competed wi
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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To that, may I add... Fuck Oracle Sideways with a Bandsaw.
Still, if Oracle had won... (Score:4, Insightful)
it would have been a $20B contract.
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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
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$20B
before extensions and further lawsuits on why its now $35B
Wait - “Big Red”? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Wait - "Big Red"? (Score:1)
or roadkill
Re:Wait - “Big Red”? (Score:5, Funny)
I thought it was when all the women in the office synchronise.
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Anybody who does kind of dates themselves. "Big dick" is the modern terminology.
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As far as I know, that used to be Novell. It was always said with an almost British undertone of derision.
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Perhaps Novell was once referred to this way. These days, it's what The Register calls Oracle. And it makes a degree of sense, if you think about it ... compare to Big Blue == IBM.
But if you detect a British sense of derision, that is because The Register is a British company and its motto is "Biting the Hand That Feeds IT." (I know, I used to work there.)
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Isn't "big red" a brand of tomato sauce? Heinz or something.
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https://youtu.be/zIJWUAPpNeE?t... [youtu.be]
Re:Wait - "Big Red"? (Score:2)
I thought Big Red was the Nebraska Football team. "Oracle, we will tackle your ass!"
Also a type of cinnamon chewing gum. "Oracle, we will gum up your works!"
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Because JEDI is an old buzzword (Score:2)
As a former Oracle employee, I'm not surprised. (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.
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Running up a single server on AWS with CloudFormation can be really simple which is why the CF tutorials are often just that use case. When you start using CloudFormation to orchestrate a VPC, subnets, security groups, AD controller(s), (finally) your application server(s), CloudWatch monitoring and alarms, Lambda functions to manage 1st stage fail overs (EC2 volume swaps) and 2nd stage fail overs (instance rebuilds) it becomes anything but simple. The bus factor for AWS quickly outgrows the bus factor for
Re:As a former Oracle employee, I'm not surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
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I never worked for Oracle, nor have I worked for Amazon. I'm just a user of their services... I see the writing on this wall, it's obvious you don't.
And just in case you misunderstand my position here, I'm not saying Oracle is a good choice either.. BOTH Oracle and Amazon do the same things with varying degrees of success with their own products. I'm just pointing out that AWS is NOT following a "standard" for it's cloud services, that it's more than that, a lot more, all designed to get you hooked so y
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I'm just pointing out that AWS is NOT following a "standard" for it's cloud services, that it's more than that, a lot more, all designed to get you hooked so you cannot leave.
1)What standard should AWS have followed? "The Cloud standard" is basically "What AWS does".
Maybe the closest to a standard is the cloud native foundation, which AWS contributes to.
2)I am not aware of any AWS service that is intentionally designed to make it difficult to leave, in fact many services have specific features to allow customers to leave. There are a number of public examples of AWS customers who have left (with specific assistance from AWS), and later returned.
If you have examples of where AWS
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Ah come on and think..
I work in an environment where we've spent a LOT of effort in our dev-ops pipeline on AWS. ALL that integration work would be for not should we decide at some future date to switch providers. That's just the start.. There are all those Amazon only services designed to make your application faster, cheaper, easier to develop that they charge you for. Multiple database options, development and CM tools, machine learning API's, and security services all are priced al a cart. Yea they m
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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.
Don't buy Oracle!! (Score:1)
Their salesdroids are the worst.
Reply? (Score:2)
Oracle:
You and your licensing stinks.
Sincerely,
DOD
PS: kisses!
Ora-who? (Score:1)
Um ... (Score:3)
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?
Come on, Oracle (Score:2)
Business as usual (Score:3)
this is why government is inefficient (Score:2)
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)
I swear they used to be a technology company...
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they used to be a technology company...
Really?? In what century?
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It might just be a rumour, but I heard they put out a decent DBMS in the 20th century.
Nothing since then that I know of.
Standard Proceedure (Score:1)
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)
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...
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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 ;)
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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
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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.
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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.
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BEEOG? That does not spell Boeing.
Why would you buy any flying device from a company called Boing Boing Boing?
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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
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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
waaaaaaa (Score:2)
50 Page Filing (Score:4, Insightful)
50 pages to say "I wanted that money!"?
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The be sure the reader fully understands his position.
Seems legit (Score:2)
Simple enough (Score:2)
"Because it's not us."
They needed the contract (Score:1)
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.
A concerning bullet point in the TFA (Score:1)
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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Ubbi Dubbi [wikipedia.org]