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The Cabinet Office is understood to have formally contacted central agencies within the last month and asked them to look for ways to “get rid of Oracle".
No. 10 is believed to be concerned about the amount civil servants are spending on the database giant’s applications and software.
A Cabinet office spokesperson told The Register: "As part of our continuing digital transformation and efficiency programmes, we regularly review technical requirements within a department to see how they may have changed."
The chief problem is the sheer number of Oracle licenses in the UK government, not just their price, although the public sector spent £290m on Oracle in 2013, according to TechMarketView.
Individual IT chiefs will have their own relationship with Oracle and pay for licenses rather than re-use licenses of those within their own department.
In January The Reg reported that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), which has around 10,000 staff, was forking out for two million Oracle licenses at £155 per employee, for an annual cost of £1.3m per year. (That worked out at 200 licences per civil servant in the department.)
That’s contrary to the Cabinet Office’s own guidelines of £93 on licenses, with a view to reducing that down further to £52.
Meanwhile, the mighty Home Office has tried to slash its Oracle budget by moving an ERP contract to a shared-services platform run by Steria. A Register source told us: “Nobody has a holistic view or how Oracle is used across the whole government or looking at economies of scale.”
The source described the the central communication as an “edict” that has been interpreted as an order to move away from Oracle.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @06:55PM
Taxes horribly spent. You develop quite a bit of custom software for hundreds of million a year. And it's not like you'd have to start from scratch either. It always flabbergasts me why governments etc public institutions don't develop their own software shared among similar institutions... I guess money is much easier to spend when it's not yours.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Thursday August 06 2015, @07:57PM
It's not like that hasn't been tried. It usually ends in horrible failure that turns out much more expensive then possibly ever imagined.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @08:17PM
It always flabbergasts me why governments etc public institutions don't develop their own software shared among similar institutions... I guess money is much easier to spend when it's not yours.
It isn't about spending other people's money, it is about (a) doing it the same way the majority of private sector businesses do it and (b) there not being anyone with both the responsibility and the authority to leverage cross-institution development. Nothing happens in any organization, public or private, without it being someone's job to make it happen.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @10:15PM
noooo.... actually i'm pretty sure it's about spending other people's money
"nobody spends other people's money as wisely as they spend their own" has rung true throughout history and will continue to do so well into the future
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @12:16AM
A restatement without any new facts or reasoning. You convinced me!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @02:43AM
public institutions don't develop their own software
Munich: LiMux (a respin of Debian/Ubuntu) with an all-FOSS userland for all city employees has saved them €millions (That was 2012, so add a bunch more). [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [h-online.com]
shared among similar institutions
Munich again:
Their homebrew kit to make it easier to get off the proprietary office suite: WollMux [google.com]
Availible to all, gratis and libre.
...then there's the recent example of USAians failing once again:
The Veterans Administration has their VistA Electronic Health Records (FOSS) software that they continually improve--but the USA military has decided it needs its own expensive, incompatible system (with no mention of openness).
$11B Pentagon health records fiasco [politico.com]
(There must be another 4-star about to go through the revolving door.)
N.B. When eXPee EoL'd, Munich also created thousands of Ubuntu install discs and made those available gratis to its citizens.
A gov't trying to do the most good for the greatest number of people?
Isn't that odd?
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday August 07 2015, @09:50AM
The magic word is "consultant".
The second that a large government IT project appears, they appear like flies around shit. And, profit being what it is, they will churn out crap compatible with the crap specifications they are given, charge a fortune, take all the cash, then run when government wants to add one thing to the specification.
If you want to stop this, what we have to stop is MULTI-BILLION POUNDS being involved in such deals (by definition, a million pounds should get you 20-30 decent developers and I can't think of much that 20-30 decent developers can't knock up and test properly given the proper incentive), things being put out to tender and then won by golfing buddies of the guy creating the tender, and contracts with contractors with ZERO accountability, ZERO testing, ZERO scope for change over time, and ZERO ways to demand your money back if things turns to shit.
The usual scenario is that some company that handles the government's IT in another poor area gets the contract, writes shit, then refuses to fix it - and then points at the clauses that say they should still be paid despite not delivering. And like idiots, the government keeps writing those clauses and pays them MILLIONS just for having bothered to write a line of code.
Applies specifically to education, the NHS, just about any government department (e.g. DVLA, passport, etc.)