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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @05:56PM
PostgreSQL is completely free (both in money and in source code) and runs very well. Very competitive to Oracle when starting up or maintaining. How does that translate to spending more money than Oracle?
It isn't just about the database, it is about everything surrounding the database. Developer knowledge, tools, software components, off-the-shelf applications. Practically no one starts from scratch with just a database.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Friday August 07 2015, @07:11PM
I tossed you a point for insightful even if I don't agree with you 100%. You've presented good food for thought.
I think developer knowledge would be about the same between the two, although there are certainly more Oracle database people to choose from. Software components would be interesting to compare. Are tools the same between the two these days? I don't know. I think most applications these days would let you choose the database you work from. Are there applications that are not home-grown which require Oracle? If it is home-grown, wouldn't it be "just as convenient" to work with PostgreSQL?
I don't really have good answers to these questions. Someone else with more knowledge, experience, and brain cells would have to do a more thorough answer.