TechCentralTechCentral
    Facebook Twitter YouTube LinkedIn
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn YouTube
    TechCentral TechCentral
    NEWSLETTER
    • News

      Management shake-up at TymeBank – including a new CEO

      24 May 2022

      Standard Bank CEO apologises for weekend downtime

      24 May 2022

      South Africa fifth in Africa for blockchain funding

      24 May 2022

      Hein Engelbrecht to lead Mustek on interim basis

      24 May 2022

      Datatec in talks over Analysys Mason unit

      24 May 2022
    • World

      Terra collapse triggers $83-billion DeFi slump

      24 May 2022

      Zuckerberg sued in personal capacity over Cambridge Analytica

      24 May 2022

      Is the end of the bitcoin winter nigh?

      24 May 2022

      Zoom leaps higher on upbeat forecast

      24 May 2022

      Michael Dell becomes kingmaker in Broadcom, VMware deal

      23 May 2022
    • In-depth

      Bernie Fanaroff – the scientist who put African astronomy on the map

      23 May 2022

      Chip giant ASML places big bets on a tiny future

      20 May 2022

      Elon Musk is becoming like Henry Ford – and that’s not a good thing

      17 May 2022

      Stablecoins wend wobbly way into the unknown

      17 May 2022

      The standard model of particle physics may be broken

      11 May 2022
    • Podcasts

      The rewarding and lucrative careers to be had in infosec

      23 May 2022

      Dean Broadley on why product design at Yoco is an evolving art

      18 May 2022

      Everything PC S01E02 – ‘AMD: Ryzen from the dead – part 2’

      17 May 2022

      Everything PC S01E01 – ‘AMD: Ryzen from the dead – part 1’

      10 May 2022

      Llew Claasen on how exchange controls are harming SA tech start-ups

      2 May 2022
    • Opinion

      A proposed solution to crypto’s stablecoin problem

      19 May 2022

      From spectrum to roads, why fixing SA’s problems is an uphill battle

      19 April 2022

      How AI is being deployed in the fight against cybercriminals

      8 April 2022

      Cash is still king … but not for much longer

      31 March 2022

      Icasa on the role of TV white spaces and dynamic spectrum access

      31 March 2022
    • Company Hubs
      • 1-grid
      • Altron Document Solutions
      • Amplitude
      • Atvance Intellect
      • Axiz
      • BOATech
      • CallMiner
      • Digital Generation
      • E4
      • ESET
      • Euphoria Telecom
      • IBM
      • Kyocera Document Solutions
      • Microsoft
      • Nutanix
      • One Trust
      • Pinnacle
      • Skybox Security
      • SkyWire
      • Tarsus on Demand
      • Videri Digital
      • Zendesk
    • Sections
      • Banking
      • Broadcasting and Media
      • Cloud computing
      • Consumer electronics
      • Cryptocurrencies
      • Education and skills
      • Energy
      • Fintech
      • Information security
      • Internet and connectivity
      • Internet of Things
      • Investment
      • IT services
      • Motoring and transport
      • Public sector
      • Science
      • Social media
      • Talent and leadership
      • Telecoms
    • Advertise
    TechCentralTechCentral
    Home»Sections»Cloud computing»Amazon cites Trump bias at ‘enemy’ Bezos in cloud deal loss

    Amazon cites Trump bias at ‘enemy’ Bezos in cloud deal loss

    Cloud computing By Agency Staff10 December 2019
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email
    Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

    Amazon.com claims the Pentagon failed to fairly judge its bid for a cloud contract worth up to US$10-billion because US President Donald Trump viewed company founder Jeff Bezos as his “political enemy”.

    Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud unit, claimed in a lawsuit that was made public on Monday that the defence department ignored Amazon’s superior technology and awarded the contract to Microsoft despite its “key failures” to comply with requirements for the so-called Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure, or Jedi, contract.

    The Pentagon made those errors because of improper interference by Trump, who Amazon said “launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks to steer the Jedi contract away from AWS to harm his perceived political enemy — Jeffrey P Bezos,” according to the lawsuit. The president has long criticised Bezos, especially for his ownership of the Washington Post.

    The question is whether the president of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of DoD to pursue his own personal and political ends

    Defence department spokeswoman Elissa Smith denied any external factors influenced the bidding process. Microsoft spokeswoman Janelle Poole said in a statement that the Pentagon “ran a detailed, thorough and fair process in determining the needs of the warfighter were best met by Microsoft”.

    Amazon, which filed its lawsuit under seal last month in the US court of federal claims, is seeking to prohibit the defence department from proceeding without a new evaluation or award decision. The department won’t start work on the contract beyond certain “preparatory activities” until 11 February 2020, according to the lawsuit.

    “Basic justice requires reevaluation of proposals and a new award decision,” the company said in its lawsuit. “The stakes are high. The question is whether the president of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of DoD to pursue his own personal and political ends.”

    Front-runner

    The Pentagon’s Jedi project is designed to consolidate the department’s cloud computing infrastructure and modernise its technology systems. Amazon was widely seen as the front-runner for the contract because it previously won a lucrative cloud deal from the Central Intelligence Agency and had earned the highest levels of federal security authorisations.

    Amazon said in its lawsuit that the Pentagon’s “pervasive errors are hard to understand and impossible to assess separate and apart from the president’s repeatedly expressed determination to, in the words of the president himself, ‘screw Amazon'”.

    Amazon was citing a new book by Guy Snodgrass, a speechwriter to former defence secretary Jim Mattis, that alleges that Trump, in the US summer of 2018, told Mattis to “screw Amazon” and lock it out of the bid. Mattis didn’t do what Trump asked, Snodgrass wrote. Mattis has criticised the book, but hasn’t commented on the allegation concerning Amazon.

    Donald Trump

    Amazon’s lawsuit also lists other comments and actions by Trump and the defence department to make its case that the Pentagon bowed to political pressure when making the award to Microsoft. In 2016, Trump said that when that he would become president, Amazon would “have problems” and that the company was “getting away with murder”, according to the lawsuit.

    The company also cited the president’s comments during a press conference in July, when he openly questioned whether the Jedi contract was being competitively bid, citing complaints from Microsoft, Oracle and IBM. Later that month, Trump “doubled down” on that rhetoric when he tweeted television coverage that characterised the Jedi contract as a “Bezos bailout”, the lawsuit says.

    Losing bidders face steep odds to overturn a contracting decision on the legal basis of political or vendor bias

    As Trump’s criticisms persisted, Amazon alleges, the Pentagon took numerous actions to “artificially level the playing field” between the company and its competitors during the bidding process, including a decision in mid-2018 to refuse to evaluate past contract performance. For example, the lawsuit alleges that months after the Pentagon initially reviewed Amazon’s proposal, the defence department changed one of its requirements for hosting sensitive data, which prevented Amazon from leveraging its existing data centers and increased its total proposed price.

    The Seattle-based company also contends the Pentagon ignored critical aspects of its proposal while overlooking Microsoft’s deficiencies on concerns regarding security, price and its ability to offer a marketplace of third-party technology products.

    Strict rules

    While no law prohibits a president from weighing in on a contract, federal agencies must follow strict rules about what they can and can’t consider when making an award decision. Agencies must choose vendors based on the criteria outlined in their requests for proposals to avoid inviting a successful legal challenge, according to procurement experts.

    Still, the experts have said losing bidders such as Amazon face steep odds to successfully overturn a contracting decision on the legal basis of political or vendor bias.

    A study conducted by Rand Corp found that the US court of federal claims sustained just 9% of contract protests against the defence department from 2008 to 2016. The Government Accountability Office sustained 2.6% of contract protests during the same time period, though a much larger percentage of challenges led the agency to make changes to the procurement decision or terms, according to the study.  — Reported by Naomi Nix, (c) 2019 Bloomberg LP

    Amazon Amazon Web Services AWS Donald Trump IBM Microsoft Oracle
    Share. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email
    Previous ArticleApple to return to CES after 28 years
    Next Article How to build a profitable telecoms business in today’s market

    Related Posts

    Management shake-up at TymeBank – including a new CEO

    24 May 2022

    Standard Bank CEO apologises for weekend downtime

    24 May 2022

    South Africa fifth in Africa for blockchain funding

    24 May 2022
    Add A Comment

    Comments are closed.

    Promoted

    Generalists tend to outperform specialists when the going gets tough

    24 May 2022

    Vodacom champions innovation acceleration in Africa

    23 May 2022

    Kyocera answers top 10 questions on enterprise content management

    23 May 2022
    Opinion

    A proposed solution to crypto’s stablecoin problem

    19 May 2022

    From spectrum to roads, why fixing SA’s problems is an uphill battle

    19 April 2022

    How AI is being deployed in the fight against cybercriminals

    8 April 2022

    Subscribe to Updates

    Get the best South African technology news and analysis delivered to your e-mail inbox every morning.

    © 2009 - 2022 NewsCentral Media

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.