Despite President Trump’s public attacks on the company, tech giant Amazon is still in line to receive a lucrative contract to exclusively provide cloud services to the Department of Defense.
The Pentagon announced last month that it would choose just one vendor to provide it with cloud computing services. Amazon Web Services, which holds a dominant 44 percent of the cloud market, is in prime position to receive the multi-year contract.
This is despite the fact that Trump is no fan of the company, and has repeatedly attacked it and its founder, Jeff Bezos. The president recently called out the company for hurting the jobs market and the Post Office, and called on the Bezos-owned Washington Post to register as a lobbying organization.
The Pentagon’s decision to award its cloud computing contract, potentially worth billions of dollars, to just one company has come under fire.
“Having multiple cloud providers also insulates you against risk” said the president of the Coalition for Government Procurement, Roger Waldron. “If you are dependent on one cloud provider for ten years, if something goes wrong, what are you going to do?”
The Coalition for Government Procurement represents a number of defense contractors, including Amazon competitors IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle.
House Appropriations Committee spokeswoman Jennifer Hing questioned the combination of a single-vendor contract with a long duration.
“The Committee has concerns about any contract that limits commercial competition by locking the Department into 10-year contracts with no exit strategy.”
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter, Gab.ai and add him on Facebook. Email tips and suggestions to allumbokhari@protonmail.com.