10 Billion is quite a lot. And government contract is very stable income.

But I got your point on politics, that is something pretty unpredictable.

It is for sure a lot. AWS wants it. Everyone wants it.

But, it is a maximum of $10Billion ...over 10 years. Th at is the key thing to focus on. I'm sure both companies have private sector customers right now that pay a quarter to half-billion a year right now.

I think the greater damage is optics vs financial..and optics can cost a lot.

Let's say AWS makes $30-Billion this year. So, losing $1-billion this year is 3.33%? (Though I'm sure the contract starts not this year?)...How much will AWS be making in 10 years?

It's not only about the $10 billion. Microsoft has essentially cemented being the cloud provider for the Pentagon for the foreseeable future.

Once all of the pentagon is integrated with Azure, after the 10 years are up, it will be very unlikely for Pentagon to want to switch, not only due to costs, but everyone will have been trained specifically for handling Azure.

This gives Microsoft a massive lead in terms of government infrastructure and all but guarantees we'll be seeing more and more contracts handed to Azure.

Hopefully both sides learn from the long-term downward spiral of HP's contract with the Navy.

https://www.wired.com/2010/08/hp-holds-navy-network-hostage/

Yeah, but if MS wants that headache, why not let them have it?

Politics nowadays are just way too unpredictable and destructive. Just best not to be anywhere near it when, say, cost overruns on this project happen and you still haven't delivered anything the DoD is actually using.

> Microsoft has essentially cemented being the cloud provider for the Pentagon for the foreseeable future.

How? AWS already has 3 entire regions dedicated to the US government and those aren't going away anytime soon.

AWS certainly has numerous US government contracts; however, none of those are from the Pentagon. With the awarding of the contract, the Pentagon specifically has chosen Microsoft over AWS.

Note: Pentagon != all US govt agencies

  it is a maximum of $10Billion ...over 10 years

... because government contracts never go over original estimates?

I'm not sure if there is a "law" around this, but, I assume nearly all contracts go over budget. Private or .gov.

But, government contracts are pretty beholden to a tight, static budget. Once the money is gone, it's gone. You can't necessarily go ask for additional taxes and budget for the year. Many times, you literally cannot go over budget no matter what. The pay-as-you go, variable pricing you get in the cloud, is actually a challenge in government budget.

In the private sector, when you go over budget..funds can be found elsewhere in the company, etc.

Politics? Amazon already serves the CIA so that probably wouldn’t be a con. 10B is a massive contract.

Ask Frank Underwood says: When the tits are that big, everybody gets in line.

The CIA is not politics though. Politics require highlighting. You'd be surprised how little the CIA highlights of what it's doing, and what that costs. Contrasted against the military, which tends to highlight almost everything of what it's doing, and what that costs.

And 10 billion over 10 years is what? Maybe 3 to 5% of Amazon's yearly revenue? You really want to be at the epicenter of the shitstorm that will happen if the project goes over budget and you still haven't delivered anything anyone in the DoD actually uses? (Maybe I shouldn't have said "if the project goes over" but "when"?) Especially being a big tech firm nowadays?

And you're gonna step into all that unnecessary drama for access to a 10 year / 10 billion project?

I don't think so. Not for a billion a year in revenue when you're already sitting at over 230 billion a year in revenue. (Or even just the over 30 billion a year that AWS alone is sitting at.)

Admit it man, politics being what they are these days, particularly for big tech firms, it's just not worth it.

You must contend with politics working for USG at any level for any department/agency. There are plenty of very nasty, bitter politics within each of the intelligence agencies, as well as, across the larger intelligence community (IC). These are massive organizations with very large budgets. Because these battles occur in classified settings, they are not visible to the public. I highly doubt that AWS hasn't had to content with a myriad of political battles within CIA, not the least of which being, groups within the CIA who remain skeptical about "cloud" and trusting a third-party with their data.

But they don't care about any political battle invisible to the market.

That's the point.

It's the shitstorms that generate the tweetstorms that impact their larger bottom line.

Of course they care about those battles. Not only could they impact their renewal and/or trigger large penalties, but they can (and often do with large contracts) percolate up to Congressional oversight committees. Unless you have experienced intensity of political battles within the IC, it is impossible to understand their stakes (in terms of both money and reputation) for $100 million+ programs of record.

I’m not sure, a lot of people think HQ2 is being built in the capital region just to support JEDI, and as others have mentioned the knock on effects in the ecosystem are much larger.

$10B in this bid, once you win one, others are easier the thinking goes. This is for Department Of Defense, USA has a lot of other departments. Not to mention state and local. "If we were good enough for DOD, surely your county /state can trust us..."

They made a lot of noise about building a new hq in Arlington. I can’t imagine they’re going to build it out at any scale now.

US East is in NoVA I think? Basically, the defacto HQ for AWS. Why would Amazon have a second HQ anyplace else was always the real question?

(They seemed to like the idea of New York a little bit. Probably because of multimodal transport connections to NoVA and the Europe/Africa side of the world. But even that fell through. And as far as I can understand, that too was because of politics.)

I live about 2 miles away. I can tell you that not only have they been building it out at a prodigious pace (they had people were working in Crystal City by the end of 1Q2019). They have signed construction contracts, leases, extended offers to employees, etc. They are committed to it now.

Also, Amazon has a tremendous footprint here already. Their largest region is located in Ashburn (~25 miles east), CIA is roughly 5 miles for Crystal City, Herndon and Ballston have large AWS sales/engineering offices, and Richmond (roughly 1.5 hours south) hosts one of their largest distribution centers on the east coast. In short, they were committed to this area long before HQ2, let alone JEDI. They cannot be happy about losing the contract award, but it was only one of many things Amazon/AWS are going in NoVA.