We're saving tax payers' money on Oracle licensing, honest, says Gov.uk The Cabinet office has signed a 'memorandum of understanding' with Oracle in a desperate bid to ease the financial burden of its eye-wateringly expensive contracts with the database titan. The body reckons it will "deliver additional savings" for the taxpayer over the next three years. But when asked by The Register exactly …
They're annoyed that Oracle put the full amount on official documents rather than charging it as part of a support contract or something else which would be easier to "lose" in the bureaucracy of government. Means they have to deal with the embarrassing situation of either people knowing they agreed to pay it or having to put forward actual practical policy, which is a lot of work they can't be having with
“We found ourselves in a situation where there wasn’t really anywhere else to go.” Kit Malthouse quote.
Ah, the monopolists' wet dream.
Could the Competition and Markets Authority not take a look?
If, as seems to be the case, Oracle really does have the government and other customers over a barrel and is abusing that position then surely a case can be made for an investigation into their behaviour.
Face it - when you have a large amount of data stored in, and application built upon, whatever which is not plain ASCII files, you're going to depend on whatever manages those data, and moving away may be so expensive, and take so much time - with all the implied risks, it could be cheaper to stay with the current system even if still crazily expensive.
It would have happened with any other system - even open source ones - which doesn't mean "free" ones if you have to rely on truly professional paid support.
Moreover, offering features or solutions nobody else matches yet isn't illegal. Do you believe there are people who use Oracle despite its crazy prices just because of the name or because they get bribed? When it gets to very large, complex databases the available options unluckily becomes very few, because most of the efforts are directed to cover the medium sized databases (and the small ones), where it is easier to make money with a relatively moderate effort thanks to the larger user base - while many of the very large databases proprietary solutions implemented by some very large companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) may be very vertical, or never made available for general use, or both.
Oracle database? I heard postgreSQL is pretty capable, and it has a good price too. Not big enough for your needs? I heard good things about Hadoop, and that too got a good price.
Corporate support for these? Hire someone, some firm or consultant specialized in this. They develop a solution for you, for whatever is not available. They charge too much after a few years? Hire someone else, but have in the contract the clause that you own (or better, redistribute) whatever software the first guy developed, and also have the necessary staff to evaluate their ongoing work to make sure the code under the hood is not crap that mysteriously works and is utterly unmaintainable, let alone human-understandable.
How hard is that?? Very hard when you have a standard MBA "I don't know computers" CIO twerp.
Before jumping out of the known pain, there should be a TRANSPARENT analysis.
Being desperate to get off the Oracle boat may land them in hot water.
The smart thing would be to move to the cloud, private or Public. I think there is a way in which you can move to the private cloud hosted in your own datacenter but pay only for Application subscription. (Saving on hardware and license)
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