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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, 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_