> So they go anti-the-other-guy instead of making sure they have the better deal?
How can you make sure you have a better deal... when the process is not open to you? The article says open Amazon are being allowed to bid and the first aim of Oracle is to just be allowed to bid.
> Their goal is to make sure that the award process is opened up to more than one company and unseat Amazon as the front-runner for the multibillion-dollar deal.
They are allowed to bid. They just want the Pentagon to split its information across multiple cloud products because they find it unlikely that they'll win such a big contract on merit alone.
> The Pentagon has said it intends to move the department’s technology needs -- 3.4 million users and 4 million devices -- to the cloud, indicating the massive size of the award. Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, have repeatedly said no decision about the winner-take-all contract has been pre-made and that bids will be considered on their merits, with an award to a company or a team of companies expected in September.
What rational reason would there be for a corporation or government entity to spread its information across multiple cloud products? That would be like mandating that half a company use LibreOffice and the other half Office365 for the sake of "equality".
What rational reason would a large organization with such sensitive information have to move to the cloud at all? This seems horrifically stupid from an organizational and informational risk perspective.
This has to be willful ignorance designed to pretend its just about managing hardware while ignoring the elephant in the room of compromising your business's (and client's) privacy.
You might not like data center management, but the trade you are making is giving hypervisor control to a third party with 10s of thousands of employees outside of your oversight which also happens to be one of the most valuable targets for hackers in the world. You could easily have AWS employees (or hackers who have compromised the control network) dumping everything interesting from your HD images to the highest bidder and you have no means to detect this.
AWS is okay if you are only collecting relatively innocuous consumer account info, but it's completely unacceptable for any companies holding data/executing processes that can have a major impact on society when it leaks/fails.
Knowing that AWS vs. Oracle means AWS wins comes from clicking around in the interface and using the API for a few minutes. Even if Oracle was free it would not be worth the pain.
How can you make sure you have a better deal... when the process is not open to you? The article says open Amazon are being allowed to bid and the first aim of Oracle is to just be allowed to bid.
> Their goal is to make sure that the award process is opened up to more than one company and unseat Amazon as the front-runner for the multibillion-dollar deal.