IBM complaint might have just cost Amazon $600M CIA cloud deal
June 7, 2013
Grazed from Network World. Author: Brandon Butler.
Amazon Web Services may have just lost out on a $600 million contract to supply cloud computing services to the Central Intelligence Agency, after the federal government upheld a protest that IBM had made related to the awarding of the contract.
Amazon Web Services reportedly secured a four-year, $600 million contract to provide "commercially managed" cloud computing services to the CIA. IBM filed a protest with the federal Government Accountability Office, and the GAO today agreed with IBM and recommended that the CIA rebid the contract. Federal Computer Weekly first reported this news today…
According to a memo by the GAO’s general counsel, IBM’s protest has been upheld on two counts: that the CIA failed to evaluate prices comparatively, and that it made special exceptions for Amazon Web Services regarding the waiving of a certain parts of the request for proposals, which proceeded the contract awarding. IBM made other protests as well, including that the CIA did not properly take into account service outages that AWS experienced last year, but the GAO did not uphold that argument…
Read more from the source @ http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/060613-ibm-amazon-cia-270575.html