Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz said she discussed the U.S. Defense Department’s cloud-computing contract with President Donald Trump and understands that the Pentagon’s plan is to find only one provider.
The Pentagon intends to award a single contract for multi-year cloud services. The contract could go to one team made up of multiple companies. A final request for proposals, which outlines a contract as long as 10 years, is scheduled to be released in May and awarded by the end of September.
“It just made no sense,” she told journalists at Oracle’s offices in Petach Tikva, Israel. “I never heard of something like a single cloud, and I would challenge anyone to point at a significant commercial customer who has one cloud.”
Catz added that the procurement process seemed designed to benefit Amazon.com Inc.’s AWS, which rivals some of Oracle’s computing and storage products. “I have no idea why they were given unfair advantage,” she said Monday. “I have no idea why anyone would think that is a good idea.”
Trump told her that “he was very confident that the Pentagon would have a fair review,” she said.
“I talked with him about what commercial customers are doing in their moves to the cloud,” Catz said, adding that she told the U.S. President that, according to her understanding, the Pentagon’s plan is to pick a single cloud provider.
“I cannot think of a single commercial enterprise that has only one cloud. The way we see it, the Microsoft workloads should go to Microsoft cloud, Amazon workloads should go to Amazon, Oracle should go to Oracle cloud, Salesforce should go to Salesforce. I never heard of something like a single cloud, and I would challenge anyone to point at a significant commercial customer who has only one cloud; it makes no sense,” Catz said.
“That makes the appearance of a lower number (for the cloud business) even though money is actually coming in to another bucket,” Catz said.
“As this evens-out, I think we are going to start seeing cloud acceleration again that is very significant, but I don’t want to time that right now.”
Following this, Oracle shares were up 0.3 percent to $46.24. They have fallen 11 percent since the company’s disappointing earnings were release last month.
