Donald Trump whines and dines Oracle co-CEO Catz – reports

Oracle’s co-CEO Safra Catz was reportedly set to enjoy a slap-up meal with US president mop-haired windbag Donald Trump last night, giving the pair a chance to compare Amazon-bashing notes.

The evening was, according to Bloomberg, also going to involve Peter Thiel, founder of CIA-backed data analytics biz Palantir, making it no one’s idea of a dream dinner party.

Catz has been linked to the Trump administration on multiple occasions, having once been tipped for secretary of the Treasury and just last month positioned as a possible candidate for national security adviser.

And back in 2016, her decision to join Trump’s transition team even led to one of Oracle’s managed cloud services execs leaving the company in protest at the alliance.

This time, the wining and dining of Big Red’s top brass came after Trump directed his Twitter ire at the tech rival that Catz and Oracle CTO Larry Ellison love to hate: Amazon.

On March 29, Trump slammed Jeff Bezos’ biz, saying “they pay little or no taxes”, use the postal service “as their delivery boy” and are putting other retailers out of business.

I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2018

The prez claimed that the Post Office loses an average of $1.50 for each Amazon package it delivers, and reiterated his claims yesterday afternoon:

I am right about Amazon costing the United States Post Office massive amounts of money for being their Delivery Boy. Amazon should pay these costs (plus) and not have them bourne by the American Taxpayer. Many billions of dollars. P.O. leaders don’t have a clue (or do they?)!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 3, 2018

Of course, the Donald’s stance has nothing to do with Bezos also owning The Washington Post, which has criticised Trump and in the process been branded a peddler of fake news by the president.

Meanwhile, Amazon has been tipped as the main contender in a bid to win a lucrative Pentagon cloud services contract.

The Department of Defense announced earlier this month that it would choose a single company for the deal – which is offered for an initial two years, with option to extend to a total of a decade – to reduce complexity in its systems.

A draft proposal document said that the DoD had a “lack of coordinated enterprise-level approach to cloud infrastructure”, with “fragmented and largely on-premise computing” storage systems. The set-up makes it “virtually impossible” for warfighters and leaders to make critical data-driven decisions at speed, it said.

As such, it is seeking a single cloud services provider “with an existing, large, globally available public offering” to run the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud program for all branches of the military.

However, the decision to award the for the multibillion-dollar contract to a single firm has put the frighteners on cloud competitors, which see Amazon as a shoo-in due to its strong position in the cloud marketplace and existing government cloud contracts.

This is particularly true for legacy database firms like IBM and Oracle – the latter, of course, being famously late to the cloud party after Larry’s early dismissals of the tech.

Of course, Trump hasn’t mentioned Amazon’s provision of government computing services in his Twitter tirades, but one imagines the issue might just have come up during last night’s dinner. ®