Oracle | The Contracting Education Academy

March 3, 2021 By cs

Microsoft’s president calls for bid protest reforms

After years of pain over the legal battles related to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract, Microsoft is calling on Congress to take a look at the protest process.

During a Tuesday Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on emerging technologies and national security, Microsoft President Brad Smith said it’s time to examine the protest process because it does not keep up with the speed of technological innovation. Smith’s remarks come as continuing legal troubles threaten to sink JEDI, which Microsoft was re-awarded in September.

“We all want to ensure fairness,” Smith said. “And that includes a fair right to be heard. But we could definitely benefit from an accelerated timeline to do so.”

The Defense Department conceived the $10 billion JEDI concept around four years ago, but implementation has been held back because of multiple legal challenges from Oracle, IBM and Amazon Web Services throughout the procurement. Oracle recently filed a petition with the Supreme Court for a review of a decision on its own pre-award JEDI protest.

As it stands, a decision from a federal judge on a motion filed by Microsoft and DoD on portions of AWS’s protest alleging improper political influence in the award process by administration officials is pending.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2021/02/microsoft-president-calls-bid-protest-reforms/172248/

Also see: https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2021/02/should-pentagon-reform-its-bid-protest-rules/172260/

January 8, 2020 By cs

Time to end Oracle’s long legal fight against JEDI cloud contract, government says

Government attorneys are telling a federal appeals court that it should rule against Oracle in its long-running legal challenge to the Pentagon’s JEDI Cloud contract — partly because some of Oracle’s legal claims are now beside the point.

Oracle is seeking to overturn a lower court ruling that found the Defense Department was on solid legal footing when it structured the multibillion dollar cloud contract. The company claims the Court of Federal Claims made “grave” errors in its ruling, including by brushing aside what Oracle alleges were serious conflicts of interest involving DoD employees and Amazon Web Services.

But in a response the government filed with the appellate court on Dec. 26, attorneys said any alleged improprieties surrounding AWS are now moot because of the Pentagon’s surprise decision in October to pick Microsoft, not Amazon, as the winner of the JEDI contract.

“Indeed, Oracle requested that AWS be eliminated from the JEDI competition, and DoD has effectively granted this relief, albeit for different reasons, by the award to Microsoft,” DoD and Justice Department attorneys wrote in their brief to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. “Accordingly, the court could not presently grant relief that would redress the alleged errors.”

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2020/01/time-to-end-oracles-long-legal-fight-against-jedi-cloud-contract-government-says/

March 6, 2019 By AMK

Oracle providing post-deployment system support to the Army

Oracle America Inc., Redwood City, California, has been awarded $18,850,000 for fixed-price-level-of-effort task order.

The order was placed under a previously awarded indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract (M67854-17-D-7609) for continued post-deployment system support including, service management, service operations; production and pre-production system sustainment; solution development environment; enterprise training and training devices; product lifecycle support; and service transition for change requests and engineering change proposals.

Work will be performed in Stafford, Virginia (50 percent); and Quantico, Virginia (50 percent), and is expected to be completed by December 20, 2019.

Fiscal year 2019 operations and maintenance funding, from the Marine Corps, in the amount of $18,850,000 will be obligated at the time of award and will expire at the end of the current fiscal year.

The base contract was awarded on the basis of a sole source justification in accordance with Federal Acquisition Regulation subpart 6.302-1 (Only One Responsible Source). The Marine Corps Systems Command, Quantico, Virginia, is the contracting activity.

Source: https://www.afcea.org/content/oracle-providing-post-deployment-system-support-army

March 1, 2019 By AMK

Pentagon investigating whether Amazon employee tilted JEDI contract

The Defense Department will review whether a former employee—who now works at Amazon Web Services—improperly impacted the integrity of its $10 billion JEDI cloud contract.

The conflict of interest investigation comes approximately one month before the Pentagon was set to award the $10 billion contract—to host, analyze and process swaths of classified and sensitive military data—to one of four competing companies: AWS, Microsoft, IBM or Oracle.

In a partially redacted court filing released Friday in Oracle’s suit against the Defense Department, government lawyers explained their motion to stay—or delay—the case stemmed from “new information” regarding “possible conflicts of interest involving former DoD employee, Deap Ubhi.”

Ubhi worked in the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service for almost two years in between jobs at Amazon Web Services.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/02/pentagon-investigating-whether-amazon-employee-tilted-jedi-contract/155118/

After years of pain over the legal battles related to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract, Microsoft is calling on Congress to take a look at the protest process.

Government attorneys are telling a federal appeals court that it should rule against Oracle in its long-running legal challenge to the Pentagon’s JEDI Cloud contract — partly because some of Oracle’s legal claims are now beside the point.

Oracle has appealed its claims court loss to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in yet another escalation in the Pentagon’s troubled acquisition of its general services cloud.

Oracle America Inc., Redwood City, California, has been awarded $18,850,000 for fixed-price-level-of-effort task order.

The Defense Department will review whether a former employee—who now works at Amazon Web Services—improperly impacted the integrity of its $10 billion JEDI cloud contract.

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