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It bid high and lost. Should Amazon be allowed a do-over on JEDI?

blogs.microsoft.com

51–60 of 156 posts

Re: It bid high and lost. Should Amazon be allowed a do-over on JEDI?

#51
JEDI aside, I feel like Azure has grown in leaps and bounds... meanwhile AWS has rested on its laurels because they were the first major cloud and so many people adopted them early and either are stuck or in denial about where Azure is at. Even Microsoft shops that would benefit from tighter integrations and quicker feature releases seem to only really consider Azure an afterthought and will use GCP for specialty cases in lieu of AWS.

I'm not trying to be a fanboy for MS, but I've found Azure much easier to adopt personally, and their tooling especially around databases can work really well. With AWS I feel like with every service I have to try out 3 or 4 third party tools for development which causes a ton of overhead and risk of using a tool that changes direction or stops meaningful development. Whenever I try to challenge the status quo people at work react like I'm an idiot. Although, I'm not suggesting to a heavily-invested org that they should switch clouds, but just asking questions like why we are heavily using RDS SQL Server when Azure SQL-whatever-version-you-want would work even better and often cheaper.

Re: It bid high and lost. Should Amazon be allowed a do-over on JEDI?

#52

DoD officials are barred from answering questions about White House influence on the decision owing to its assertion of "presidential communications privilege"[1]. This is, quite simply, a confession. Nothing is solved by believing that the administration is somehow different than the dozen or so near identical leaders in other countries: that somehow this one uniquely is not pressuring companies hostile to it (in sp…

> This is, quite simply, a confession.

That's like saying pleading the 5th is a confession...

Re: It bid high and lost. Should Amazon be allowed a do-over on JEDI?

#54
I wouldn't get too excited about a PR letter from a Microsoft lawyer.

IBM and Oracle made early protests that were dismissed, but Amazon's was sustained. Note, Oracle is appealing the dismissal of its protest.

This is regarding the injunction that is in place now:

In the ruling, the judge said Amazon was likely to show that Microsoft offered a “noncompliant storage solution” to reduce the costs of its JEDI bid and that the Pentagon “erred” by not issuing a “deficiency” to Microsoft’s proposal. The judge concluded that Amazon’s “chances of receiving the award would have increased absent [the Pentagon’s] evaluation error.”

https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2020/03/amazon-quit...

Re: It bid high and lost. Should Amazon be allowed a do-over on JEDI?

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has put a LOT of money into DC. From setting up an HQ2 in DC to Bezos personally purchasing the largest mansion in the city to host event for political power brokers. It should be no surprise that he's pissed that that amount of investment isn't starting to pay dividends.

Not to mention the newspaper.

It's worth not mentioning.

Re: It bid high and lost. Should Amazon be allowed a do-over on JEDI?

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure is less friendly as a technology practitioner (compared to working with AWS), but I fully appreciate the value you describe. Does AWS have Active Directory as a first class citizen? Office 365? Outlook/Exchange? No.

AWS does offer AD as a first class citizen... More than Azure. AzureAD is not Active Directory, and unless something has changed a lot in the last year (maybe it has?), Azure does not offer anything that looks, smells, and feels like on-prem AD in the cloud.

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Re: It bid high and lost. Should Amazon be allowed a do-over on JEDI?

#57

My take on this whole thing, is the Amazon basically wrote the entire scope...so they just thought they were going to win because only they would meet it (this was a bit of a scandal just a few months back.) They bid high, and then they lost. Now they are mad that their lobbying wasn't a 100% success, so they are suing. It's all so very Amazon.

Amazon has put a LOT of money into DC. From setting up an HQ2 in DC to Bezos personally purchasing the largest mansion in the city to host event for political power brokers. It should be no surprise that he's pissed that that amount of investment isn't starting to pay dividends.

IBM and Oracle also protested the bidding/RFP process. Their protests were dismissed twice so far. Once by the agency and again by a judge. Oracle has appealed the judge's dismissal of their protest.

In contrast, Amazon's protest resulted in an injunction because the judge determined it was likely Amazon would prevail in trial.

Re: It bid high and lost. Should Amazon be allowed a do-over on JEDI?

#58
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "ahead". Is AWS cutting edge? Maybe, but does your business need cutting edge? Likely not. I see an enormous shift in the market towards Azure from clients of all sizes, for a variety of reasons (cost, married to AD/O365/etc, not wanting to give a competitor [Amazon] dollars). Azure definitely has the momentum, it's their race to lose against AWS. Disclaimer: Thoughts and opinions my own, not that of any emplo…

This was immediately after they mentioned 95% of Fortune 500, etc. so I assumed market size. But, maybe that was the intention without giving any details. We’ll never know until office is separated out in MSFT reporting I guess.

It’s also very carefully worded.

> More than 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies run Microsoft Azure.

For example, I worked at a large media company and we had a couple Azure services spun up related to our email service.

But the bulk was on AWS, which handled our business workloads — eg, serving video.

Is Microsoft counting my former employer among that 95%?

Re: It bid high and lost. Should Amazon be allowed a do-over on JEDI?

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The evidence we received" is fairly meaningless when coupled with "we weren't allowed to obtain the evidence we wanted ".

I've lived through an IG investigation. You generally only want to respond in writing so you give a correct and complete answer instead of misspeaking and having it used against you, your project, or agency later on. It doesn't hold the legal consequences of screwing up an FBI interview but can be devastating professionally.

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Re: It bid high and lost. Should Amazon be allowed a do-over on JEDI?

#60
post #7

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/15/pentagon-amazon-tru... > The Pentagon’s inspector general “could not definitively determine” whether the White House influenced the procurement process for a major cloud computing contract because senior Defense Department officials were barred from answering questions on the subject during interviews, according to a 313-page report released on Wednesday.

A quote past the first paragraph of the story: > the IG said "we believe the evidence we received showed that the DoD personnel who evaluated proposals and made the source-selection awarding Microsoft the JEDI Cloud contract were not pressured about their decision on the award of the contract by any DoD leaders more senior to them, who may have communicated with the White House." As with most articles, the juicy, sal…

"However, we concluded that Mr. Ubhi’s brief early involvement in the JEDI Cloud Initiative was not substantial and did not provide any advantage to his prospective employer, Amazon, in the later JEDI Cloud contract competition, which was decided two years after Mr. Ubhi’s resignation from the DoD. Although Mr. Ubhi’s actions from September through October 2017 was misconduct, his minimal contributions to the JEDI procurement process did not affect the conduct or outcome of the JEDI Cloud source selection." JEDI ROI, Page 8, Paragraph 3

IG Report PDF https://media.defense.gov/2020/Apr/15/2002281438/-1/-1/1/REP...

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