Oracle counters DOD's single award argument for JEDI
Oracle disputed the contracting officer's conclusion that a single-award contract will reap better terms for the Defense Department and that a single-award contract will be easier and less costly to secure and manage.
Oracle continues its fight against the Pentagon and Amazon Web Services over DOD’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract, filing an official motion for judgement in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Judge Eric Bruggink put that effort on hold with a temporary stay issued on Feb. 19, but Oracle’s motion is still worth reading.
In its original complaint, Oracle criticized how the contracting officer reached some of her conclusions, but in the motion for judgement, the company offers more details and some of them are real head scratchers.
According to Oracle’s filing, the contracting officer ruled that there would be no benefit to DOD if JEDI were a multiple-award contract versus the single award. Any benefit would be far outweighed by the added costs associated with a multiple-award contract, the CO claimed.
The CO calculated that a task order under a multiple-award contract would cost $127,852 on average, but the average for a task order under a single-award contract was $2,596, a whopping difference of $125,256.
If JEDI were to have 4,032 task orders (the contracting officer’s estimate) over its 10-year life, it would cost $515.5 million under a multiple-award contract, compared to $10.5 million for a single award.
The contracting officer also found that a multiple-award contract would have 770 years of delay across the 10 years.
“These assertions strain credulity,” Oracle wrote in its motion.
The contracting officer also stated that DOD will spend 1,688 hours awarding each multiple-award task order but only 32 hours for a task order under a single award.
During testimony during Oracle’s Government Accountability Office protest, the contracting officer said she derived her hours calculations from “personal experience” but said she had never purchased cloud services through an IDIQ contract.
The 770 years of delay is based on the contracting officer’s assumption that a task order under a single award contract takes 30 days and a task order under a multiple-award contract takes 100 days. She then multiplied the 70-day difference by the estimated number of task orders of 4,032 to get 282,240 days, or 773 years.
Oracle said the administrative record provided by DOD doesn’t “corroborate any of the inputs.” In other words, the record doesn’t say where the contracting officer got her data such as the number of task orders.
Oracle also attacked the contracting officer’s conclusion that a single-award contract will reap better terms for DOD and that a single-award contract will be easier and less costly to secure and manage.
The company also disputed contracting officer’s position that a single award contract is the only way DOD can pool the data it wants into a single source.
The company cited an intelligence community lessons-learned report on the CIA commercial cloud that AWS has built.
According to Oracle’s filing, five years into the contract the CIA has not be able to create a so-called data lake. The challenge has been the slow migration of data to the cloud and that intelligence community analysts continue to use databases that are outside the cloud. “Data maintained in different instances of the cloud, using different programs, is not pooled,” Oracle wrote.
DOD and AWS have until March 5 to respond to the motion, but there will likely be a delay before a public version is released by the court.
A longer version of this column was first posted on Washington Technology, a sibling site to GCN.