Oracle Corp. co-CEO Safra Catz is not backing down from her campaign to prevent Amazon.com from singlehandedly landing a coveted $10 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Pentagon.
The Department of Defense has said it plans to award the multi-year cloud services contract to a single company, a decision that has also drawn swift criticism from lawmakers and other technology giants, like Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines, who say it should be broken up into smaller contracts and awarded to multiple companies.
The worry, Amazon’s competitors say, is that Amazon Web Services is the only company with the scale to truly compete for the contract.
"I have no idea why they were given unfair advantage,” Catz told journalists Monday at Oracle’s offices in Israel, according to Bloomberg. "I have no idea why anyone would think that is a good idea.”
Her public comments this week follow a private dinner earlier this month with President Donald Trump in which Catz reportedly complained to him about Amazon's odds to win the deal. In that dinner conversation, which was reported by Bloomberg, she apparently did not mention to Trump that Redwood City-based Oracle is also pursuing the contract.
Speaking at Monday's event, Catz said the single contract "just made no sense,” according to Bloomberg. "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.”
The Pentagon contract, dubbed Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, is still in the pre-solicitation phase. The White House has said that Trump, a frequent and outspoken critic of Amazon and its CEO and co-founder, Jeff Bezos, doesn't have any say in who gets the deal.
“The president is not involved in the process,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters earlier this month. She added that the Department of Defense “runs a competitive bidding process.”
Catz is one of the rare Trump supporters in Silicon Valley. She sat on the president’s transition team, attended a technology summit at Trump Tower ahead of the inauguration, and at one point was rumored to be in the running for the role of National Security Adviser, replacing Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster. Trump instead appointed John Bolton.
Also on Monday, Catz said that despite the bleak outlook for cloud revenue growth that Oracle delivered in March, the company expects that business to accelerate, Reuters reports.
Oracle pulled in $1.56 billion in sales from cloud software and services in its most recent quarter, up 32 percent from this time last year. Looking forward, the company said in March, it expected to grow its cloud revenue by 19 to 23 percent — lower than investors had been expecting.
The company's cloud business was impacted over the last few quarters by a new model that resulted in higher license growth, Catz said. “That makes the appearance of a lower number (for the cloud business) even though money is actually coming in to another bucket,” she said at Monday's event. “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.”
— Luke Stangel contributed to this report