8 ms·
Microsoft wins $927M Pentagon contract
- eganist 10y agoI like articles that consist of just one sentence. > Microsoft Corp has been awarded a $927 million contract to provide technical support to the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Pentagon said in a statement on Tuesday. > (Reporting by Mohammad Zargham) In all seriousness, this shouldn't be a surprise given the amount of outdated systems and general reliance on Microsoft tech at DISA.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- metaphor 10y ago> I like articles that consist of just one sentence. I like articles like that too...just not when they're packaged in a ~4MiB page sprinkled with ads.
- stephengillie 10y agoThe page works fine as a flat page with JavaScript disabled. And that was the most concise article I'll read all day.
- mohamedattahri 10y agoTo be fair, Reuters is not really known for articles. This is not unusual for news agencies, as opposed to newspapers or magazines.
- andreasley 10y agoHere [1] is the actual statement on defense.gov. [1] http://www.defense.gov/News/Contracts/Contract-View/Article/1035122 http://www.defense.gov/News/Contracts/Contract-View/Article/...
- richardboegli 10y agoGood find. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13228363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13228363
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mdrzn 10y agoWe should change OP's link and leave the title.
- ageofwant 10y agoMr. Zargham certainly is a concise writer.
- up_so_floating 10y agoA bit too long-winded for me.
- provost 10y agoI'd encourage Mods to swap the link. Also, here is the Microsoft enterprise agreement for those interested: https://enterprise.microsoft.com/en-us/industries/government/dod-joint-enterprise-license-agreement-jela/ https://enterprise.microsoft.com/en-us/industries/government...
- sctb 10y agoThanks, we've updated the link from http://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-pentagon-idUSKBN1492O4 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-pentagon-idUSKBN....
- FLUX-YOU 10y agoI knew MS shared their code with select customers, but has the DOD always had it?
- youdontknowtho 10y agoThey were one of the first customers of that shared source review program.
- mtw 10y agoHow is it deemed "reporting"?
- jwtadvice 10y agoThere are three times as many public relations professionals as journalists in America. Media companies are being consolidated into a few owners, many of them with tech leadership. Microsoft, for example is the MS in MSNBC (although I think they recently sold MSNBC?)
- freddref 10y agoHow many people are typically involved in this type of decision?
- bmelton 10y agoIt depends on the type and scope of the contract. Federal Acquisition Regulations do a fair job at keeping oversight and "fairness" (depending on a lot of factors), but at a minimum, you'd have: * A large body of workers and analysts constructing the requirements * A few contracts officers working to codify those requirements into a request for proposal * A handful of technical contracts officers evaluating the mass of responses * A large pool of technical contracts officers and contracts officers ensuring that the statutory grounds of the proposals are met (verifying that yes, this is a small / veteran owned / minority owned business or yes, this business does have prior qualifications, etc.) After you've separated the wheat from the chaff, and eliminated the obviously incapable parties, the team contracts down to 1 or 2 contracts officers and their staff. This team evaluates the technical feasibility against the requirements, asks a lot of questions to their own technical teams, and then ultimately, votes on the winner.
- ageofwant 10y agoWell so much for "making America Great Again".
- blister 10y agoWhat would you suggest as the alternative? Have DISA write their own tech stack, operating systems, and cloud services? This is a freaking great deal for the government.
- xj9 10y agoRedHat
- blister 10y agoDISA is a big group. They have mountains of RedHat instances already as well. I would bet they've probably got a billion dollars or so invested in the RedHat infrastructure. If I had to hazard a guess without seeing the SOW/PWS, I would bet that most of this MS contract would cover desktop support services. DISA supports IT services for a huge portion of the DoD. This is basically a Fortune 100 company in terms of employees and scale.
- nkassis 10y agoProbably more like multiple Fortune 100 companies combined.
- niels_olson 10y agoAre we talking DoD or DISA? DISA is probably close to a Fortune 100 company. DoD's annual spend exceeds Apple's market cap. The annual research budget is $40B+
- Bedon292 10y agoI don't have any real numbers to back it up, but I have been told that Red Hat costs the government more money per machine for the licenses. At least within the DoD. Now this could well be attributed to buying less licenses, and not getting as much bulk discount. But Red Hat not necessarily a cheaper option. And even if you got the license costs down you would still have to pay absurd amounts in retraining the entire workforce.
- blister 10y agoThis is an ID/IQ, which means that DISA has set aside $927M over five years for optional services and support. ID/IQs are a cool contract vehicle because it gives the government a cost-effective way to buy just what they need as they go along. Even if they leveraged the hell out of this contract, they're basically buying the full power of MS for $185M per year. That's a hell of a good deal for the government.
- frankydp 10y ago+-1.5M DISA email users(Navy/MC unclass contracted separately) at 185M a year is quite a bargain. Not to mention desktop/laptop OS, collaboration tools, web servers, forest/domain management at 800 sites in 70 countries.
- blister 10y agoOh dang. I estimated tens of thousands. I was off by an order of magnitude and I was the one trying to defend this contract to HackerNews. Lol. Yeah, DISA is freaking huge. We're doing some work for them right now and the scope is massive. Speaking of which... if any of you have a Secret clearance and want a job... :)
- Retric 10y agoOut of curiosity, if you have a Secret clearance and it expires after 10 years where does that place you on the scale from never having a clearance 0 to having an active clearance 10.
- USNetizen 10y agoYour Secret clearance now expires sometimes within a matter of months of being off a contract or out of a job that requires it. OPM is cleaning up the clearances, and revoking millions of them. I've had employees go from active TS to "eligible" status (which mean no clearance) in a matter of a few weeks after their contract ended. That whole "10 year active period" is not true, at least anymore, unless you are in a position that requires the clearance for that whole period of time. You're considered lucky to retain a clearance more than a month out of the service now, too. OPM is taking a tough stance on unused clearances and it has negatively impacted the job market for recently separated Veterans because the contracts that come out all require a pre-cleared workforce, which is a rapidly diminishing pool of people to pull from given that clearances are now being revoked as soon as someone gets out of the service or leaves their last position.
- niels_olson 10y agoIn other news, Microsoft just bought the most lucrative position for corporate espionage available on planet Earth.
- nunez 10y agoSomeone's getting sweet Christmas gifts this year.