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January 4, 2019 By AMK

Someone is waging a secret war to undermine the Pentagon’s huge cloud contract

As some of the biggest U.S. technology companies have lined up to bid on the $10 billion contract to create a massive Pentagon cloud computing network, the behind-the-scenes war to win it has turned ugly.

In the past several months, a private investigative firm has been shopping around to Washington reporters a 100-plus-page dossier raising the specter of corruption on the part of senior Defense Department and private company officials in the competition for the JEDI cloud contract. But at least some of the dossier’s conclusions do not stand up to close scrutiny.

The dossier insinuates that a top aide to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis worked with Mattis and others to steer the contracting process to favor Amazon Web Services, or AWS — and enrich the aide. The aim of the dossier seems clear: to prevent the deal from going solely to AWS, the odds-on favorite in part because it operates the CIA’s classified commercial cloud. Far less clear, however, is who backed its creation and distribution.

It’s an unusually hardball form of backroom maneuvering in the world of lucrative but rigidly controlled defense contracting. The firm that prepared the dossier, RosettiStarr, shopped it to various Washington reporters earlier this year. Defense One was given a copy in May. At the time, RossettiStar President and CEO Rich Rosetti declined to reveal who funded the firm’s efforts.

Former defense officials told Defense One they received inquiries about the allegations from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Reuters, and the Intercept. For months, the accusations went unaired by news outlets, including Defense One and Nextgov, sister publications in Atlantic Media’s Government Executive Media Group.

But in the past few weeks, some of the information in the dossier has surfaced in various publications. Now that the dossier’s targets have been publicly accused, they are speaking out. In exclusive interviews with Defense One and Nextgov, they vehemently deny any wrongdoing and seek to turn the spotlight on their mysterious accusers.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/08/someone-waging-secret-war-undermine-pentagons-huge-cloud-contract/150685/

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: acquisition strategy, bid protest, cloud, DoD, GAO, JEDI, Pentagon, protest, single source

October 11, 2018 By AMK

2nd protest filed against Pentagon’s proposed single cloud acquisition

IBM filed a bid protest Wednesday against the Pentagon’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract.

The pre-award protest, filed with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Oct. 10, 2018, comes just two days before the Oct. 12 deadline for the Pentagon to accept bids from cloud service providers.  IBM officials told Nextgov they still plan to submit a bid for JEDI, but the company’s protest takes issue with the Defense Department’s decision to award JEDI to a single cloud service provider.

“JEDI’s primary flaw lies in mandating a single cloud environment for up to 10 years,” said Sam Gordy, General Manager for IBM Federal, in a blog post announcing the protest. “Leading global enterprises want clouds that are flexible, provide access to the best applications from multiple vendors, and can smoothly transition legacy systems. JEDI is a complete departure from these best practices.”

Oracle, another JEDI competitor, protested the JEDI solicitation in August on similar grounds. Oracle has subsequently filed a series of amended protests in the months since under legal seal, with a final decision expected from GAO by mid-November.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/10/ibm-files-bid-protest-against-pentagons-jedi-contract/151908/

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: acquisition strategy, bid protest, cloud, DoD, GAO, JEDI, Pentagon, protest, single source

May 22, 2014 By AMK

Replacing Russian rocket engine isn’t easy, Pentagon says

The Pentagon has no “great solution” to reduce its dependence on a Russian-made engine that powers the rocket used to launch U.S. military satellites, the Defense Department’s top weapons buyer said.

“We don’t have a great solution,” Frank Kendall, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, said yesterday after testifying before a Senate committee. “We haven’t made any decisions yet.”

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered the Air Force to review its reliance on the rocket engine after tensions over Russia’s takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea region prompted questions from lawmakers about that long-time supply connection. United Launch Alliance LLC, a partnership of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co.,  uses the Russian-made RD-180 engine on Atlas V rockets.

Among the options the Air Force is outlining for Hagel are building versions in the U.S. under an existing license from the Russian maker or depending only on Delta-class rockets that use another engine, Kendall said. The U.S. also could accelerate the certification of new companies to launch satellites that don’t use the Russian engine, he said.

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., a Hawthorne, California-based company that’s trying to break into the military launch market, said at a March 5 congressional hearing that launches may be at risk because of dependence on the Russian engine.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-30/replacing-russian-rocket-engine-isn-t-easy-pentagon-says.html

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: Air Force, AT&L, bid protest, DoD, single source, sole source

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