Google Cloud earns defense contract win for Anthos multi-cloud management tool

It was well known that at the JEDI bidding, GCP's offering is vastly behind MSFT and AWS.

Note that that does not necessary contradict the original decision to withdraw based on conflicting AI principle.

Edit:

A few things GCP is behind at the time:

* Very weak support team

* Very weak sales team

* Very weak past track record

* Very poor market recognition

* Very limited experience in government contracting

Offering is not just technical features. A product is a combination of a lot of things, and technical items are usually the less critical ones.

I would imagine it's more a matter of contracts and relationships than strictly features. Doing business with the government generally requires a dedicated business unit - not because their requirements are markedly different (although they can definitely be more strict on security requirements) but more because there's just a mountain of paperwork to be a qualified vendor. Google or not.

AWS and Azure have a ton of services up and down the value chain but I kinda doubt the DoD is interested in more than compute and storage. Everything past that is security and price.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but I wasn't involved at all with anything regarding JEDI).

I think it's more accurate to say that we did not have (and do not have) the Impact Level 6 (IL-6) authorization that JEDI strongly suggested. As a commenter below says, that doesn't actually mean "vastly behind" any more than "Oh, you don't have " would mean vastly behind.

The Defense Department now has a writeup actually [1] about some of this (search for "Impact Level"):

> In an October 22, 2018 letter to the OIG, Representatives Womack and Cole raised concerns about the RFP’s “gating or restricting provisions” that seemed to be tailored to one specific contractor that the Representatives did not identify. On September 6, 2018, Oracle made a similar allegation in its supplemental complaint to the GAO. For example, the Representatives referred to “the requirement that the Cloud Service Provider meets the Defense Information Systems Agency Impact Level 6. Currently, this unnecessary requirement, along with many others, can only be met by one specific contractor."

> [...] As of December 2018, Amazon Web Services was the only contractor granted an IL-6 authorization."

> [...] We reviewed the JEDI Cloud RFP and found that it did not include a gate criteria that required a contractor to meet the IL-6 security requirements; rather, the RFP Statement of Objectives required a contractor to have infrastructure capable of meeting security requirements associated with hosting information classified at the Secret level within 180 days of contract award. The contractor’s infrastructure also had to meet security requirements associated with hosting information classified at the Top Secret level, within 270 days of contract award. Additionally, on December 12, 2019, DISA granted Microsoft IL-6 authorizations, demonstrating that more than one contractor was capable of meeting the security requirements.

[1] https://media.defense.gov/2020/Apr/15/2002281438/-1/-1/1/REP...

This was surprising to me, but in retrospect not that surprising

    - AMZN 2019: 280.5B
    - GOOG 2019: 160.7B
    - MSFT 2019: 125.8B
    total:       567.0B
         
    - DoD  2019: 686.1B