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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: 4, Insightful) by kaganar on Thursday August 06 2015, @07:07PM
Doesn't matter which way it cuts -- consolidate or splinter. Company I work for has a dozen divisions, most of which use some Oracle products. Oracle contacted us about consolidating our accounts into a single account. Cool, right? Maybe we can get some bulk discounts? Wrong. Turned out to be 10% more expensive, but at least we could get a proper invoice that way! -- and less paperwork, that's a good thing, right? Again, wrong -- we wouldn't be able to separately invoice divisions anymore, so we'd have to manage that internally. But it'd make it a whole lot more simple for Oracle.
Oracle is in the business of extracting value, not providing it.
(Score: 2) by Daiv on Thursday August 06 2015, @10:17PM
Oracle is in the business of extracting value, not providing it.
You mean like a business?! What the hell!!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @12:25AM
>> Oracle is in the business of extracting value, not providing it.
> You mean like a business?! What the hell!!
No. Like a parasite.
The fundamental premise of free trade is that both parties derive more value from the transaction than they started with. That is how wealth is created, it is not supposed to be a zero-sum game. But when the seller is a *-opoly the buyer loses in the transaction -- at best they just lose less than they would if they didn't transact at all.
Your post is one of those unintentionally revealing statements that is actually pretty disturbing.
(Score: 2) by Daiv on Friday August 07 2015, @02:21AM
Yeah, I just assume every single business I deal with on a daily basis is constantly trying to bleed me dry. It's my responsibility to defend every one of my pennies and research every option I have. I find I'm sometime stuck with the least worst option and oftentimes I find myself going without instead of giving in.
If you thought my my post was in any way defending businesses, it's quite the opposite. Interesting that you assumed otherwise, that disturbs me about you, Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @03:58AM
If you thought my my post was in any way defending businesses, it's quite the opposite. Interesting that you assumed otherwise, that disturbs me about you, Anonymous Coward.
Your suck at expressing yourself reflects solely on yourself. If you are disturbed by how people interpret your writing, don't write minimalist vague, sarcastic sentences that test Poe's Law.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @08:32AM
Or maybe you should get a fucking life and stop trolling people, Gravis.
(Score: 2) by Daiv on Friday August 07 2015, @02:00PM
Confirmed. You look for ways to argue with people no matter what is said.
As someone aware of Poe's Law, and the context of my previous reply, the sarcasm should have been apparent.
But here I go conversing with some Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @06:07PM
> Confirmed. You look for ways to argue with people no matter what is said.
Confirmed. You look for ways to avoid responsibility for what you say.
> As someone aware of Poe's Law, and the context of my previous reply, the sarcasm should have been apparent.
The context in your head. Expecting your audience to be mind-readers may make you feel akamai, but it is a guarantee of failure to actually communicate your ideas.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Friday August 07 2015, @01:38AM
Does anyone know anyone who loves using Oracle? I'm being serious. I have never read a comment online from an Oracle customer who were really happy with what they had.
I have only limited experience with them, but at a previous job the PHB decided the new CRM system we were creating ourselves from scratch (I don't know either) would be Oracle.
No one could really follow his reasoning at the time, I understand, but an awful lot of the features users requested wound up being late, slow or buggy.
In my current job we have some sort of Oracle ordering system (or something, I have nothing to do with it). The users hate it, but have no choice but to use it.