IBM intervenes in Amazon cloud case

Grazed from FCW.com.  Author: Frank Konkel.

The battle between tech titans IBM and Amazon Web Services to win a cloud computing contract with the CIA worth up to $600 million now resembles a chess match, with each side answering the other’s moves with legal filings and carefully crafted public statements.  AWS won the contract to build a massive private cloud infrastructure for the intelligence community in January.

IBM then filed a bid protest in February that the Government Accountability Office upheld in June, directing the CIA to comply with recommendations it made.  Then on July 24, AWS challenged the necessity and scope of corrective actions the CIA took in response to recommendations from the GAO, filing a complaint against the federal government in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in hopes of expediting a resolution. AWS seeks a formal response from the court by Sept. 23…

But Big Blue didn’t sit idly by.  Its legal team moved to intervene immediately, and its formal request was granted by Judge Thomas C. Wheeler on July 25 – neither AWS nor the federal government objected. In legalese, an intervener is a nonparty that joins ongoing litigation because the judgment affects the rights of the nonparty. As an intervener, IBM is also afforded the right to answer any claims made by AWS…

Read more from the source @ http://fcw.com/articles/2013/08/06/ibm-response-amazon-court.aspx