Pentagon Outlined
Its Plans For The Procurement To IT Vendors At An Industry Event In Northern
Virginia
In late February, Oracle Corp co-CEO Safra Catz met with a top Pentagon official to discuss the government’s defence strategy days before the department was set to outline how it plans to spend billions of dollars on cloud-computing services.
Catz's meeting with Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, who was confirmed by a spokesman for the department, came as technology companies voiced their concern that the Pentagon wanted Amazon.com Inc's cloud department to be the sole provider for a multi-year Contract to modernize its technological infrastructure.
With Amazon Web Services gaining two more cloud contacts, Amazon Web Services is seen as pioneering the US Department of Defense Cloud Award, while companies such as Oracle, Microsoft Corp, and International Business Machines Corp are fighting for part of this business.
Oracle has a strong interest in how the agreement will be awarded as it has long-term agreements with several government actions that use their flagship database to store information in their own systems. With agencies switching to cloud computing and Amazon eye market leader, these steps jeopardize Oracle's traditional revenue streams. Oracle has tried to protect its database business through its own cloud services, but has come too late in this market.
Catz Meeting
The Catz meeting was "one of several similar meetings that Under Secretary Shanahan is having with senior leaders of technology companies to inform them about the National Defense Strategy and its implementation," said the spokesman of the Department of Defense, Captain of the Navy, Jeff Davis, in an email. Davis said that the Pentagon cloud initiative was not specifically discussed and that no specific contract or company was mentioned. Oracle declined to comment on the meeting.
The Pentagon, which has promised a fair and competitive selection process, on Wednesday announced plans to acquire IT providers at an industrial event in northern Virginia. Google from Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and Alphabet Inc. are just some of the companies that plan to join.
"For years, Congress urged the department to streamline the way we buy, maintain and invest in capabilities," Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a March 1 statement on the event. "We achieved this by taking advantage of the innovation and ingenuity of private industry."
Shift To Cloud
Cloud services-in which computing power and storage are housed in remote data centers operated by an outside company instead of on-premises locally owned machines-can range from feeding email and storing files to the Internet. staff to execute complex decision-making algorithms. The Pentagon said it is making the switch to the cloud to strengthen its use of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning and the Internet of Things.
Still worried that the Pentagon might favor Amazon, technology companies point to the US Department of Defense's decision in early February to award a $ 950 million contract to REAN Cloud LLC, an Amazon subsidiary. Data in the cloud. the DOD said it was unaware of the price it paid for its innovation department in Silicon Valley and reduced the contract to $ 65 million.
REAN Contract
Oracle officially protested against the REAN contract in February, saying that the company is opening a door to AWS, claiming that Amazon is pressuring customers to use REAN, a person familiar with the presentation.
The president of the Coalition for Government Procurement, which includes corporations such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, wrote in a November letter that "a single contract from the DOD Enterprise Cloud Acquisition would give the DOD a single focus in the cloud and therefore performance risks and national security. "
Sam Gordy, the US state's chief of administration, said he would prefer that the DOD award contracts in multiple clouds competitively.
"God forbid that we go to war next year for up to five years, that will be the cloud we go to war with," he said. The United States should not be imprisoned, "because in peacetime it was easy to throw everything into a cloud."
Modernise Technology
The rustling over the cloud contracts comes while the administration of President Donald Trump tries to modernize the technology infrastructure of the federal government. Last March, Trump founded the United States Office of American Innovation at the White House to gather information from business leaders on technology improvements, among other things. In August, the White House American Technology Council, led by former Microsoft chief financial officer Chris Liddell, issued a report demanding that federal agencies speed their adoption of the cloud.
The cloud infrastructure market tops 44.2 percent in Seattle, followed by Microsoft Azure with 7.1 percent, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd in China with 3 percent and Google Cloud Platform with 2.3 percent based on revenue. 2016 cloud industry to the research firm Gartner Inc.
Amazon already has a contract in the cloud with the USA. UU Central Intelligence Agency dating from 2013 worth $ 600 million. The online retail giant led by Jeff Bezos has the fastest growing advocacy arm among technology companies and has spoken with the Pentagon about the cloud or purchases since at least the year 2016, according to the disclosures of the groups. Federal pressure.
Present Bids
The companies will probably exhibit their respective strengths as they submit bids to the government. While Amazon is a leader in cloud services, Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., Emphasizes its focus on security, and Redmond, based in Washington, touts its ability to move existing databases to the cloud in stages. , keeping some tasks and internal data if the client wants.
The transition to the cloud could threaten on-site database providers, such as Oracle and IBM, based in Redwood City, Calif., Based in Armonk, New York, which has long been supplying government technology products, but later they entered the cloud market.
"For Oracle and IBM, any government contract feels important, they are entrenched government vendors," said Lydia Leong, a cloud analyst at Gartner. "The changes to the cloud and leave their architecture is not a happy situation for them."
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