The government was apparently unimpressed by the common sense suggestion it refrain from instituting a $10 billion cloud-based information platform with a single-provider solution.

Do you like good gadgets?

Those sweet cool gadgets?

Oh, yeah

According to a document released today by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) Oracle protested the bidding process for the following reasons:

The RFP provisions leading to a single-award IDIQ contract violate provisions of statute and regulation, which create a statutory preference for using multiple awards when establishing IDIQ contracts valued over $112 million
The terms of the solicitation unduly restrict competition because they exceed the agency’s needs
The agency failed to properly consider potential conflicts of interest related to the procurement. GAO denied the protest in each of these areas.

The Government basically responded by putting its fingers in its ears and saying ‘nuh uh.’ That’s a gross simplification; the GAO’s document actually states it denied the protest for the following reasons:

GAO’s decision concludes that the Defense Department’s decision to pursue a single-award approach to obtain these cloud services is consistent with applicable statutes (and regulations) because the agency reasonably determined that a single-award approach is in the government’s best interests for various reasons, including national security concerns, as the statute allows. GAO’s decision also concludes that the Defense Department provided reasonable support for all of the solicitation provisions that Oracle contended exceeded the agency’s needs. Finally, GAO’s decision concludes that the allegations regarding conflicts of interest do not provide a basis for sustaining Oracle’s protest.

Which, as you can see, actually contains three different instances of ‘nuh uh,’ not just one. Interestingly, Oracle’s protest centers on the fact that the government has made the bidding for Project JEDI so restrictive that hardly any company could meet its rigor.

In the meantime, Google dropped out of the running, conveniently claiming JEDI didn’t meet its ethics — right around the same time news was breaking that Oracle was filing the petition.

At the end of the day it’s worth wondering why the Pentagon is hellbent on blowing its $10 billion load on a single-provider for a cloud-based defense platform. As IBM said, “No business in the world would build a cloud the way JEDI would and then lock in to it for a decade.”

So why is our government putting all of Project JEDI’s eggs in one basket?