IBM Is Trying To Squash Amazon’s $600 Million Cloud Deal With The CIA
June 4, 2013
Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Julie Bort.
IBM is trying to block the massive 10-year, $600 million cloud computing deal Amazon won from the CIA in January. Big Blue had also bid on the CIA cloud but didn’t win. Now it has filed a protest, reports Federal Computer Week’s Frank Konkel.
It’s actually pretty common for the losing bidders to file protests when huge government contracts are at stake. For instance, last year IBM won a protest over a $543 million contract for wireless tracking sensors awarded to HP. But after a review of the bids, the government decided to stick with HP…
Since this is the CIA we’re talking about, most of the protest papers, like the bid itself, is confidential. So, we still don’t know exactly what the CIA is hiring Amazon to do. We do know this contract is for a some sort of "private cloud," sources told Konke in March, and that’s a game changer for Amazon and the cloud-computing world. Amazon, the world’s largest cloud computing vendor, has not offered private clouds before. Sharing the hardware via a public cloud is what keeps costs low…
Read more from the source @ http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/IBM-Is-Trying-To-Squash-Amazon-s-600-Million-4572313.php