Pentagon Slashes Cloud Contract Awarded To An AWS Partner

The criticism came swift and fast. Industry officials feared of AWS having an inside track with Pentagon, which has been moving its computing systems to the cloud on a priority basis.

And this has resulted in slashing of a deal awarded to an Amazon partner, whereby Pentagon cut the amount from nearly $1 billion to no more than $65 million. While also dramatically limiting the scope of work for the company.

Full details are provided here, but basically Pentagon was immediately hit with criticism after it had awarded a $950 million contract to Rean Cloud last month.

A firm based in Herndon, Virginia.

Remarkably, this move to curtail the contract by more than 90% comes just two days before the Pentagon is set to host an industry day that provides a chance for companies interested in bidding on cloud computing contracts get to hear from government procurement officials.

And it comes after weeks of denunciation from some in the industry that this abovementioned procurement was not handled properly.

Of course, these are all charges that Pentagon denies.

But these criticisms peaked recently when rivals lamented the fact that it made no sense picking a company to migrate the services when the ultimate cloud provider was yet to be chosen. Industry officials also criticized the fact that Pentagon did little to announce the contract.

It became public when the company itself touted it in a new release.

As for Rean Cloud, the issue arises from the fact that the vast majority of its federal work has been with AWS, though this contract was specifically worded to allow the company to work with any cloud provider that agencies might ask for.

Still, rivals argue that since Pentagon had not yet awarded the large contract for a cloud platform, which is said to worth billions of dollars, it should not have move ahead with this migration deal.

Improper or not, this thing is just getting started.