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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: 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.)