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United Kingdom Oracle The Almighty Buck

UK Government Signs New Deal With Oracle 54

Posted by samzenpus from the sign-on-the-dotted-line dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The Crown Commercial Service (CCS) has signed a deal with Oracle that should allow it to cut down on spending and licensing costs with the software provider. The three-year partnership will see the two collaborate to deliver services to public sector bodies including the National Health Service. A few weeks ago the government announced it would be cutting back on its use of Oracle software, but the new deal instead extends the existing agreement. CCS CEO Sally Collier explained: "The enhanced MoU will deliver savings across government and allow easier and more effective procurement of Oracle products and services. It lays the foundation of a more collaborative relationship between government and Oracle."
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UK Government Signs New Deal With Oracle More

UK Government Signs New Deal With Oracle

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  • oracle db (Score:3)

    by greenfruitsalad ( 2008354 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @04:36AM (#50360315)

    their product is godsend if you're a contractor/admin. but as a user/customer, there are nicer graves to lie in.

    • yap
    • Oracle has been the favoured database backend for a lot of healthcare software that I've ended up procuring.

      What has been quite interesting is that two of our software vendors have just delivered updates as part of the contract. In both cases, part of the upgrade was to "upgrade" the database from Oracle Enterprise to Postgres. From the cost of licensing, there's no surprise why the application vendors are doing this. Not being adequately experienced with SQL, I don't really know enough about postgres to

      • i only administer the underlying servers, not the DB itself, but in the past i witnessed a lot of moves from Oracle to EnterpriseDB (commercial postgresql). I don't think the opensource version of postgresql (at the time) was a suitable replacement for some of the more advanced features oracle offered.

  • Market in action (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Karmashock ( 2415832 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @04:45AM (#50360339)

    Oracle is largely indifferent to consumer complaints because most of their consumers are big organizations that are often captive to their products.

    But... if you're willing to eat the pain to get their attention, apparently you can get through to them that they're behaving like jackasses.

    • Re:Market in action (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Chrisq ( 894406 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @05:12AM (#50360403)

      Oracle is largely indifferent to consumer complaints because most of their consumers are big organizations that are often captive to their products.

      But... if you're willing to eat the pain to get their attention, apparently you can get through to them that they're behaving like jackasses.

      They have ways of leveraging the lock in. Once company I know of bought various products, one of which they found unsuitable and didn't use. When license renewal came up they asked nit to renew that product. Oracle's answer was "sure, but that was part of the negotiated package. If you don't take that you only get the standard discount, so it will cost you X $1,000s extra not to take that package". So the company carried on paying license and support for something it didn't use until the next round of purchasing when they could renegotiate.

      • I'm not sure why people think that that is abnormal - a package is negotiated, if you want to change the package then the discount changes as its the package is negotiated as a single purchase, which you now want to change.

        Its standard all over, its not specific to Oracle.

        • Oh, that isn't the problem with Oracle. The problem is that their tech is increasingly less special and the price structure has not adapted to take that into consideration.

          They have a lot of lock in on legacy systems but going forward... any time something gets redesigned... there's a good chance Oracle is either going to have to lower their rates or risk getting dropped permanently.

        • Removing a single item of a package costing more significantly more than including it seems a *bit* odd though.

          Otherwise logically you'd buy all their products and the total bill would be $2.50.

          But no I'm sure Oracle has already thought of that. It will cost more to remove a product and it will cost more to add a product.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )

      Oracle is largely indifferent to consumer complaints because most of their consumers are big organizations that are often captive to their products.

      Which is why most enterprise software sucks so badly. The rep only has to convince an exec to pay stupid money for a site licence and that software will be there forever. Even when it becomes obvious that it's awful and affecting productivity the company will be averse to switch for fear of losing the money they've already sunk on the thing. That's how people end up using crap like Notes despite very few people having anything positive to say about it.

      • ehm... don't over play your hand. The culture from one organization to the next changes. At a lot of places they let the IT department handle it. The execs say what they want, they give a budget with the regular warning that things will be audited and you need to keep the costs as low as possible... and then they let the CIO or possibly lower down the chain deal with it.

        True, some CIOs are fuckwits but that's a reflection on the competence of the organization as a whole. Organizations in the 21st century wi

    • The U.K. didn't get through to them. Oracle has lured them deeper into the cave. This will end up costing them way more than they had hoped.

      • The U.K. didn't get through to them. Oracle has lured them deeper into the cave. This will end up costing them way more than they had hoped.

        Follow. But! Follow only if ye be men of valor! For the entrance to this cave is guarded by a creature so foul, so cruel, that no man yet has fought with it... and lived! BONES of full fifty men lie *strewn* about its lair! So! Brave knights! If you do doubt your courage or your strength, come no further, for death awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth...

    • I assume you mean customers when you say "consumers"?

      I have been a database developer and effectively dba for well over a decade, and I have worked with Oracle (from ver 6) as well as DB2, Sybase, Informix and MySQL. In my experience, Oracle win by a respectable margin on many fronts. I find their management interfaces better, nearly everything is visible in special views, for example. Their OCI API is not simple, but it is well worth learning. Their documentation is unparalleled for its thoroughness (but n

  • The enhanced MoU will deliver (apparent) savings across government and allow easier and more effective funneling of tax payer funds to Oracle. It lays the foundation of a more co-dependent relationship between government and Oracle.

    FTFY

  • I am the first to support this... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Psychotria ( 953670 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @05:30AM (#50360439)

    But, the MoU that the CCS and their CEO, and I expect SEO, EOC, PSS companies, PABs are all locked up into the same thing. It's obvious that the MOoP will go to the aforementioned people and organisations. There needs to be a PAOE regarding this decision which essentially equates to UVL giving Oracle PAPT. In the olden days, PO effectively influenced the issue of PMCs and if a PMC was enacted there would be a public outcry. Perhaps if people were given more fact then PAPT, MOoP and ESAs would be less prevalent. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case.

    • But, the MoU that the CCS and their CEO, and I expect SEO, EOC, PSS companies, PABs are all locked up into the same thing. It's obvious that the MOoP will go to the aforementioned people and organisations. There needs to be a PAOE regarding this decision which essentially equates to UVL giving Oracle PAPT. In the olden days, PO effectively influenced the issue of PMCs and if a PMC was enacted there would be a public outcry. Perhaps if people were given more fact then PAPT, MOoP and ESAs would be less prevalent. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case.

      The GOV of UK SMON has run amok. And the PMON responsible for this decision has been sleeping with all things Larry again. I suspect the next stop for Oracle is quick trip to Ottawa before the CONS get the boot by JQ PUBLIC. Us canucks are just as stupid and hooked in as the brits when it comes to major software acquisitions. Hell a quick scramble of the books caused by a "software upgrade" here in Canada could go a long way in helping to hide the real costs of government in terms of tax dollars just befor

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      Fuck.

      Someone get me a dictionary of acronyms.

    • But, the MoU that the CCS and their CEO, and I expect SEO, EOC, PSS companies, PABs are all locked up into the same thing. It's obvious that the MOoP will go to the aforementioned people and organisations. There needs to be a PAOE regarding this decision which essentially equates to UVL giving Oracle PAPT. In the olden days, PO effectively influenced the issue of PMCs and if a PMC was enacted there would be a public outcry. Perhaps if people were given more fact then PAPT, MOoP and ESAs would be less prevalent. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case.

      17 acronyms in 5 sentences. Is that a new record?

      Seriously though, as someone in another industry who doesn't know almost all of these acronyms, I couldn't tell if I was reading a joke or not.

  • What a waste of money (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21, 2015 @05:43AM (#50360465)

    Governments using our money should be using F/OSS exclusively and funding F/OSS projects if one doesn't quite suite their needs.

    • Totally agree. This would explain why the UK gov has horrid IT systems, if they funded O/S projects they could have the public help out to create an IT system that actually works. I bet it's oracle that they use to send out the letters to the deceased.

    • Re:What a waste of money (Score:4, Interesting)

      by rapiddescent ( 572442 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @06:36AM (#50360627)

      I totally agree - I was an architect for a UK gov dept (many years ago) and whilst I was first to use Linux on a big scale in a secure environment; I couldn't get them to shift off Oracle - it was because they paid single figure % of list price, vastly lower than any financial organisation I've been at. I used Oracle 9iRAC and even their shitty Java Enterprise containers (this was before the Sun acquisition) because they were almost free and it would be rude not to. Proud that I got the first open source in there though, back then OSS in Gov was rare and when the Microsoft salesguy heard about this he went mental and did everything to spread FUD with whomever would listen.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hughbar ( 579555 )
      Another me too. My borough Newham 'nearly' changed to Linux about 10 years ago. We need politicians and civil servants with a bit of courage and imagination. Of course, one or two of the first implementations will go wrong, but not 'wrong' like £6 billion odd that the Blair government wasted on the failed NHS project. I suspect that Corbyn will probably 'get' FOSS.

      It's 'interesting' that this is marked 'withdrawn': https://www.gov.uk/government/... [www.gov.uk]

      • Hah! Not surprised.

        Used to work for the NHS IT Programme ; we loved F/OSS there. It was my default position when selecting technologies for system implementation, largely because my experience with getting support from closed-sources vendors was .. you didn't.

        With F/OSS stuff my experience if you can offer a coherent bug report to the original project, you get good support. Or you can patch it yourself. Or you can poke around in the source code and work out what particular quirk you're running into and how

    • What happens if that's actually vastly more expensive than the alternative?

  • Not unexpected (Score:5, Interesting)

    by higuita ( 129722 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @05:55AM (#50360497) Homepage

    This is not unexpected ... oracle is very expensive, with huge profits levels
    a big government complains about the price... oracle ignores it
    a big government complains again about the price... oracle ignores it again
    a big government complains publicly about the price... oracle ignores it yet another time
    a big government says it will start to abandon oracle products, knowing that it would be almost impossible to really do it... oracle gives a +10% price discount, just to shut up the complain... government can sing victory, everything is still the same

    All this considering no payments under the table

    Short term switch from oracle is hard, because if you use oracle, you are already stuck, you will need to change many things
    but long term switch could save a lot of money, even with the ever increasing discounts oracle

    Oracle gives ever increasing discounts oracle depending of the "customer" financial status/portfolio and risk of stopping using oracle product, usually low.
    As governments and very big corporations/banks are very "change resistant" and have huge amount of money, they usually have little or no discounts. But even a small 10% or 20% discount is a huge saving in oracle costs... but there are companies out there that get even 90% discounts.

  • well played (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sad_ ( 7868 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @06:08AM (#50360551) Homepage

    license/support costs for oracle products were too high, oracle didn't care. release rumor that you'll drop oracle and use alternatives. get better license/support deal as a result. well played, but you still lose (as long as you stay with oracle).

  • They signed a contract with Oracle? Now yer screwed, and good!

  • Smooth talking sales people and golf course nudges always override common sense and the squelched cries of underlings who have to support bad decisions made around vendor software, news at 11.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @09:52AM (#50361777)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • >> signed a deal with Oracle that should allow it to cut down on spending and licensing costs with the software provider

    "Should?" Thanks, I needed a good laugh this morning!!!

  • ...our hospital is being downsized: so we can pay for another gold toilet for Larry Ellison.

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