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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.)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday August 06 2015, @06:55PM
Smaller departments in many if not most organizations (not just governments) often get hooked on certain products (like Oracle, but certainly not limited to that) for their operations. Sometimes (far far too often) it is because that is the only tool the IT department knows how to use, and it gets deployed once and creeps into every project. The agency just cranks it into the budget yearly, and nobody looks too closely at the details. It becomes the hammer and nail problem very quickly.
The more Data Base Administrators that get hired, the more quickly this becomes the case, and the more entrenched the agency becomes.
As a support contractor, my company has been asked to convert a variety of things to run with an oracle database, (the systems didn't need a database, or were using something far cheaper).
When I asked why, it always turned out there was one or two DBA types in IT who understood nothing else.
A couple times we acquiesced, converted at great expense, saw zero improvement in performance and a great deal more red tape in maintenance issues. Getting the DBAs involved in even minor changes or additions to data elements imposed months of delay and huge costs.
After that (and some huge DB crashes in other systems) we were able to make a strong business case to NOT convert systems with existing reliable data storage methods to anything Oracle.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday August 06 2015, @07:25PM
I only dabble with databases, because I'm more on the programming side, but I really don't understand this. If I see a programmer who only knows one language, well, that's a big strike against. I expect a decent programmer to have experience with several languages - heck, to experiment just out of professional curiosity. Sure, they'll be more current in one language or another, but they ought to know more than one.
Isn't it the same with databases? I've programmed against SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and a couple of others in the distant past. They're all just databases. The SQL dialect is slightly different, the CLI tools are more different, but in the end they all offer the same functions. Shouldn't a DBA be able to move to a new database? Heck, there aren't that many major players, shouldn't a good DBA already be at least acquainted with all of them?
I know, I'm naive...tell me why I'm wrong...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday August 06 2015, @07:52PM
"... shouldn't a good DBA already be at least acquainted with all of them?"
While I'm not or have ever been a DBA I doubt it's much different from other roles in the IT-structure of whatever company or organization you work for. If you are only using one db solution what would be the point of being knowledgeable in others? Sure it's always nice to be well-rounded and all but beyond that. Just by being proficient in one tho you will more or less be able to make your way thru others to, it's not like they are or should be totally alien to you. Why would you look for a person that uses a software solution that you don't use? Nobody is or should be paying for that. As noted it sure is nice if they are well-rounded in all aspects of IT but it's not what the HR drones will look for.
When I worked in the UNIX admin field everyone there was trained in the same things; Solaris, our entire park of machines and systems came from SUN -- if it wasn't SUN it was in the wrong place. It would have made no sense to hire an AIX person since we didn't use that. If by some miracle an AIX machine one day stood in the server-park it's not like we couldn't have figured out how to use the system (ok we would have freaked out at first that a new machine just appeared out of thin air but besides that).
Just like when you know how to program one language picking up a second isn't that hard. If you are an Oracle DBA learning how to use and manage MySQL or MSSQL or whatever you use shouldn't be hard. You should probably be able to pick it up with no issue even without much actual training. So they will be acquainted with them or be able to figure out how to do stuff, but there just won't really be much point.
The old saying of nobody ever got fired for buying IBM (or Microsoft or ...) is probably true here to -- nobody ever got fired for buying a database solution from Oracle.
In this news or case it seems to be more of an licensing issue then anything. It's not a problem with the DB solution. They just overspent and bought the wrong amount of licenses, a problem that usually just get exaggerated over time as you buy more and more but for some reason rarely seem to get rid of the old. But buying millions of licenses for 10k users (and lets for the sake of it say they have a few thousand extra licenses for other things), there shouldn't ever be a need for you to buy ~2000000 licenses. Someone fucked up there.
I wonder if Oracle will now "threaten" to move or some other such thing to keep the money stream flowing -- or it will be a bargaining chip to get them locked in on some new kind licensing deal or scheme.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @08:20PM
That explanation makes for an interesting parallel to monoculture hiring practices.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @10:18PM
that would be risky. it's just as likely to backfire and spook other governments into de-oracle-izing as well
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday August 06 2015, @08:51PM
A fair bit of the problem is that Oracle's has a "unique" dialect of SQL with different types compared to other databases. Furthermore, most Oracle projects I've seen (ab)use plSQL quite heavily. There's an entire market of things that put plSQL on other databases, such as EnterpriseDB which creates pgplSQL. While I have no recent Oracle experience, I don't remember there being a whole lot of "free" (aka, part of the database) tools for locating and doing query optimizations which added a lot of pain.
As such, something that was written for Oracle tends to be a nightmare to port anywhere else. In addition, Oracle has a LOT of overhead and pain to not only get running, but get running well. It may be better now, but Oracle 10 was a massive nightmare just to get the database installed, let alone usable on localhost to test some software. I've heard horror stories about RAC and other add-ons to the database; the idea of a clustered Oracle gives me chills (mySQL cluster is bad enough ...)
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday August 06 2015, @11:51PM
You seem to confuse "good DBAs" with the common garden variety found in many many government agencies.
Even if you run into a competent one, they have edicts handed to them from PHBs above them. Those PHBs were sold Oracle, and they put it in the budget, and by god they are going to use it, and anything else calls their judgement into question.
But all too often it is the DBA making this argument instead of (or in addition to) the PHB.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(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.
(Score: 1) by miljo on Thursday August 06 2015, @08:50PM
I know, from my experience in health care, that sometimes you can't help but to use one DB solution or another. A lot of software solutions are tightly coupled with MS or Oracle. Unless you have purchasing/accounting agent with a higher than average IT literacy who can negotiate the license fees with the vendor, and a IT line manager without world domination plans, you often get put on the hook for the DB licenses. I've seen it happen a few times especially when the organization buying the vendor solution is small and the software very niche.
I could easily see this happening in a number of smaller, hyper focused, government agencies.
One should strive to achieve, not sit in bitter regret.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by opinionated_science on Thursday August 06 2015, @11:37PM
It is public money and should serve public good. If Postgresql (or your DB of choice) doesn't do the job, fund it until it does. The changes go back to the public.
Let Oracle sell to other corporations or private interests. But the public software infrastructure should not be held hostage by profit making enterprises.
Just think of how many small IT companies could be funded to improve the FOSS software necessary to run a country...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @12:29AM
It is public money and should serve public good. If Postgresql (or your DB of choice) doesn't do the job, fund it until it does. The changes go back to the public.
Nice theory. But reality is more complicated. People go with Oracle for a variety of reasons, most of which boil down to not having enough money today. It is easier to spend less money today and worry about getting maintenance funding as part of the yearly budget than it is to spend a bunch of money up front for potential savings down the road.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Friday August 07 2015, @04:46AM
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?
If you're talking about making improvements in the PostgreSQL code base (which I think you are), then the government can hire people or contractors in the "maintenance phase" who know how to code in C and make PostgreSQL do what they want... and then submit those changes to the project for public consumption. It should be no different than hiring Oracle to do this kind of stuff. I believe there are companies that specialize in doing just this for PostgreSQL. And if it doesn't exist and if the government absolutely has to waste money by throwing it at a private company, it should be trivial for someone in the PostgreSQL community to make one and roll in the big bucks. It's quite obvious to me that any government has its head bolted on backwards when dealing with 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.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday August 07 2015, @12:46PM
I would mod you higher, but you're already maxed. What you said ought to be the gold standard for govt IT.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @03:17AM
You have it backwards: Businesses (Fortune 100 and some Fortune 500 in particular) *OWN* Government! That's how that mess mentioned with our DoD most likely happened, and why Oracle is a *VERY* profitable company. Their shit is overpriced, but not any more so than $400 nails and toilet seats.
I'm sure you also know this applies inside and between companies as well, which I know for a fact is why we're stuck at my job with a proprietary piece of crap that's just begging to be cracked.