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Comment by snarfy | Hacker News Reader

My guess is Oracle Cloud will make the most aggressive bid. Getting in bed with the government and negotiating long term contracts is how they compete.

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AWS already has 2 air gapped regions solely dedicated for the US government. With that experience and all of their services they can offer, my guess is they will win.

Edit: the sub-linked article is much better [0]. Here is a good quote from it: "In the RFP, officials noted the contract will be competitively awarded, but Amazon Web Services is widely considered the front-runner for the contract because of its existing contract with the CIA and ability to host secret and top-secret data. According to the RFP, the winning company must meet the government’s rigorous standards to host classified data within 180 days of the contract award, and meet standards to host Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information within 270 days. Currently, Amazon Web Services is the only cloud service provider that meets those standards, though officials from Microsoft and IBM say they’re close to meeting them."

[0]: https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/07/pentagon-accep...

Yep, and it's not just quantity over quality with them, but also legal over quality... Business-wise a sound strategy, but morally bankrupt and technically offensive.

Have you used the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure product, formerly Bare Metal Compute? It's not a low quality product, by any means. I'm not sure I understand your criticism, unless the point was to be intentionally nebulous.

They'll underbid, overpromise then under deliver, then contest the lawsuits, then bilk someone else.

They'll underbid, overpromise and still lose to AWS. Oracle is amateur league in cloud computing.

It doesn't matter what they can do. It only matters what they can convince you they can do.

>My guess is Oracle Cloud will make the most aggressive bid

Not sure , it's also about sells arguments.

Governement often runs on Oracle because it was the most popular RDBMS at the time with enterprise support. So this is a massive argument technically speaking to convince customer : "We'll migrate your oracle DB and infrastructure for you , we have the tooling for that".

> Governement often runs on Oracle because

...outright corruption, though that coming brilliantly to light in the 00’s in California is also why comparatively little in California State government does any more. (Also why the trend toward IT centralization in the State was stopped dead in favor of decentralized decision making with central oversight.)

Would love to read more about this, any pointers?

https://www.bsa.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2001-128.pdf

http://articles.latimes.com/2002/may/07/local/me-oracle7

Although to be complete transparent, there are multiple examples of this, so I’m not sure exactly which one GO away referring to.

The scale of oracle cloud is laughable compared to its competitors.

http://www.platformonomics.com/2018/05/follow-the-capex-sepa...

In terms of value to the taxpayer I think AWS's offering would be head and shoulders above anything else. There would be no quicker way to be fired at amazon than if evidence came out that you were rorting or delivering an inferior product to a customer, behavior thats almost assumed with other government contractors.

Interesting. So, if oracle wins, this will be the only customer they care about with its small cloud? Meaning à win on this bid, will likely make oracle cloud less attractive than before, to anyone on the outside?

It's how everyone specializing in government contracting works, and (except for who they get in bed with), basically the same in enterprise contracting more generally.

IBM, HP, and even Microsoft, among cloud vendors, are all experienced in this game, even if Amazon and Google might be less so. (Though both have five at least some, and aren't neophytes.)

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