Oracle fights exclusion from ICE cloud contract

Oracle and one its top resellers find themselves in familiar territory with a solicitation for cloud computing services that effectively excludes them from bidding.

The Homeland Security Department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has released a solicitation for a blanket purchase agreement. That solicitation says bidders have to offer Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud in order to bid.

Left out, Oracle and Mythics have filed bid protests claiming ICE is limiting competition by specifying brand names in the solicitation.

From what I can see: that protest is very similar to what Oracle and Mythics filed in 2020 after the Library of Congress specified the same cloud providers and excluded Oracle.

The Government Accountability Office sustained the protest, ruling the Library of Congress failed to justify the requirement to limit the competition to vendors supporting AWS, Google and Microsoft.

The Library of Congress proposed a corrective action but GAO found it lacking as did other efforts to amend the solicitation.

After the GAO’s ruling, the Library of Congress released a new solicitation and eventually awarded an $80 million contract to Four Points Technology LLC. In my review of solicitation documents posted by Deltek, it appears the agencyy dropped the brand requirements from the statement of work in the new solicitation.

According to the Four Points website, it is a strategic partner with AWS. So the protest's outcome didn't translate into a contract for Oracle or Mythics.

The same attorney, Craig Holman of Arnold & Porter, is representing Oracle and Mythics in the ICE protest. Holman also represented Oracle in the Library of Congres matter. He declined to comment.

My speculation is that unless ICE has written a strong justification for the brand name requirement, GAO will likely push them as they did the Library of Congress to drop the brand names from the solicitation.