The Bureau of Meteorology migrated to Amazon Web Services through limited tender — no competitive bids, no price comparison. Budget: $45 million. Final cost: $67 million. A $22 million blowout on a 5-year contract. Azure, Google Cloud, and every other cloud provider never got a look-in. The lock-in runs until 2028.
$22.0M of Australian taxpayer money was wasted at Bureau of Meteorology. The Bureau of Meteorology migrated to Amazon Web Services through limited tender — no competitive bids, no price comparison. Budget: $45 million. Final cost: $67 million. A $22 million blowout on a 5-year contract. Azure, Google Cloud, and every other cloud provider never got a look-in. The lock-in runs until 2028.
Spread across Australia's 10.8 million households, that's roughly $2 per family — enough in total for covering the university fees of 733 students.
The Bureau of Meteorology engaged Amazon Web Services for a data centre migration through limited tender. The contract grew from $45 million to $67 million — a 49% increase. While cloud migration can involve legitimate scope changes, the limited tender approach means the BOM did not test whether competing providers (Azure, Google Cloud) could offer better value. The five-year contract term creates long-term vendor lock-in.
Force BOM to justify its single-cloud strategy and mandate competitive assessment before any future cloud contract renewals.
Tracking the pressure trail — from publication to policy change. Empty boxes show what's left to do.
Every share puts pressure on the people responsible. Make it impossible to ignore.
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