It’s not unusual for government contractors to wrestle over work by, for instance, filing a protest with the Government Accountability Office, but the dispute between these tech giants has taken a far more aggressive turn, with Amazon suggesting in court papers that IBM is just a staid government contractor that is in over its head in the fast-evolving cloud world.
The stakes are all the larger as federal spending slows, and opportunities grow more limited to claim a high-profile contract.
Web-based computing has become a major government focus in the several years since Vivek Kundra, the former U.S. chief information officer (and the first to hold that role), said that federal agencies should embrace a “cloud-first” approach. Cloud computing allows users to access a pool of Internet-based servers and applications, rather than invest in their own computing infrastructure and is meant to be both cheaper and more efficient.
Since then, government contractors large and small have embraced the cloud, finding ways to help federal agencies move their e-mail and other services to the technology.
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The shift has also opened the door to newer entrants, such as Amazon Web Services, which has long focused on cloud computing but was less accustomed to working with federal agencies. About the same time Kundra gave his stamp of approval to the cloud, Amazon hired Teresa Carlson, who headed Microsoft’s federal business, to run its own public sector business. (Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos recently agreed to buy The Washington Post.)
Date: September 1, 2013