Posts by Is it me?

How to spend £35M on a web site.

1. Government Departments must adhere to CESG data & system security rules which apply to any system that connects to a government network.

2. Government departments do not trust each other with their data, so they won't share infrastructure. (This is about to change)

3. Government has to put projects out for procurement, which is included in the overall cost of the projects.

4. Bidding for government IT contracts is beyond the financial resources of most SMEs and is becoming so for quite large IT companies as well, so domestic players are gradually being frozen out.

5. Procurement takes so long that by the time its done, the thing you have bid for is out of date in that a) the underlying business has changed. b) technology has moved on. So the first thing the winning SI has to do is re-write the contract into something that can actually be delivered and is fit for purpose. This often has to be repeated because it takes so long to do it the first time..

6. A government website will follow the standard internet web site architecture, but independent of the rest of the departments IT, so it will have its own redundant, firewalls, cryptos, GSI, internal and internet links. The firewalls will be of two types, not checkpoint. There will then be at least two each of proxy servers, web servers, and database/content, on two sites geographically separated by at least 30 miles. There will be an identical pre-production which might be the stand-by site, and several development and test systems. The system will also have audit and management systems to do all the stuff you need in a network. So you get on the live site at least 4 firewalls, 6 routers, 8 servers and 4 switches.

7. Then you have to fund a support team, its tools and equipment, see statement 2.

8. The contract will be design, build, maintain for at least five years, and would include a server refresh.

And that's just for a relatively simple site. Some sites, have quite substantial analytic programs sitting behind them to provide the information displayed. Also government web site carry statutory information which they have to publish and support so the idea that you can judge the effectiveness by the cost per hit alone is silly. It's the overall benefit to the user, and the department, downloading a set of regulations cost less that printing it and sending it out in the post. The business case for the web site will have reflected on the overall cost benefit of the site. Costs £35m, save £40m is a good deal. It doesn't always work out that way, but usually because the requirements and aspirations change through delivery, and change control costs.

Wasn't there a time

That mobile companies used to boast about their coverage, and print nice big, relatively accurate, coverage maps for their networks.

It's CISCO so it must be good

Would be an appropriate strap line. Come on $1000 for a new device with what support infrastructure. Apple must be laughing their socks off. It won't hit the vanity marked, as it sure ain't cool, and HTC must be having a good chuckle and thinking, we can do better than that, and a lot cheaper.

$500 might be more appropriate.

BTW what support infrastructure would you need, Cisco provided, I'll bet.

Now there's a question for the pointy heads...

A. How many panels were sold.

B. How much extra money did the perps make.

C. How much extra profit did Apple, HP, etc make, on magin.

D. How much did it cost us, the customers.

LCD Make sells to PC builder, sells to Hardware Vendor, sells to wholesaler, sells to retailer, sells to us.

Go on Reg. we have a right to know.

Well, thank God for that.

Speaking as a God botherer, I've never had any problem reconciling science with religon, or for that matter belief.

And now we have an academic who has proved it, OMG, I just can't tell you how much this means to me. But let me express this in the following words:

Which sums it all up, so where's that treatise on Hadrons.

Perhaps the answer is,,,

To ignore premiership footballers all together and pick the team from the lower divisions where young upcoming players at least have some incentive to play football. I've seen better games of Football in the Isthmian League than the Premiership and National side usually turn out. (Yes it was that long ago).

Just what kind of incentive is "Wow another million, now shall I make my 5th Ferrari Red or Yellow", better build that extra garage as well.

Or perhaps the FA should just pay expenses, like flight and Hotel bills, and see how many of our over paid footballers want to play for England.

Hmmm

Do an OEM deal with Dell, but Larry doesn't like OEM deals. I also can't see Sun customers buying OEM Dell.

What does computer litterate mean.....

Its a bit like the law, it's just so vast, no individual can possibly retain the knowledge of how any individual component behaves. I know all about UNIX, RDBMS Systems and ERP, but I have little idea how IE or Firefox work, nor any interest in doing so, if I want too, I know who to ask, but so far as I'm concerned they do what I require. Does the law require that all lawyers and judges know all law, no or course not, so why should the fact you use a computer or even write programs mean you should know how it all works.

BTW I remember from my younger days that the Squadies and Rugby players used to have a little ditty about Bestiality being best, boys, so perhaps that's a good place to start looking for extreme porn, hmm don't a lot of coppers play Rugby.

Hmmm

50/50 Cock-up over conspiracy.

You have to wonder how easy it is for one sales division to know what another is actually doing. Equally you can imagine the man at the top saying keep this deal secret.

Best possible rates can be a real problem. If you cut to win one deal, then you have to for others, doesn't really matter too much for product, but for consultancy and development rates it's a real show stopper. Quote a low rate to get you in the door with one part of government and you'll find others want the same rate.

Does it really matter,,,

What your choice of phone is, so long as it does what you need it too?

CESG by the way can't ban anything, as has been stated they can only advise, it is up to the individuals and organisations involved to assess the risk of using a device, if they accept the risk, then it's their heads on the line.

There is a thing called an accreditation process for organisations and systems, by which a bunch of security experts review your systems and processes and decide if the totality of the solution meets the security requirements. An un-locked down server can be accredited to a very high level, provided you have taken other precautions, like not connecting it to anything outside a locked room with very restricted access.

I don't know how I'll survive...

...without one. Oh wait yes I do.

Careful Now!

Having more than a nodding association with Vetting & Barring (VBS) from a systems point of view we should remember that it did have some good points, not least that it removed the need for an individual to have to be independently CRB cleared for each and every interaction that an individual has with an organisation covered by the requirement, every year or so. So a teacher who also runs a scout group and helps to manage their child's football club, and is perhaps also a parent governor for a different school, has to have 4 different CRB checks, as they are not transferable.

Vetting & Barring reduces this to 1 which registered the individual and then allowed them to quote that registration when joining another organisation. The need to renew the registration was removed by the monitoring of the persons interactions with protection authorities. Thus if anything occurred that impacted their registration, like being arrested for assaulting a minor, it would automatically suspend their registration and organisations that employed that person could be informed, which is where it all starts to go horribly wrong.

Trouble is that there are a whole raft of unintended consequences from that very simple and laudable aim. Firstly, a lot of people who volunteer do not like the idea of being vetted, even less would they like the idea of being monitored for the rest of their life, unless the Home Secretary let them off. Why might you ask was this the case, well that is because a retired teacher, say might be convicted of an abuse, so there might be a need to go back and check all former interactions with children to see if any other offences were committed, and any victim support needed. Again, a reasonable idea, well no it isn't, the civil liberties issues that arise, just from the little I've said are horrendous, not only that, but if you take what's happened with standard CRB checking, it would actually mean that virtually anybody who could possibly interact with a child or vulnerable adult would end up being checked and registered. Companies that carry out property maintenance check their employee's because they don't know which ones might have to work unsupervised on a Home.

Also what constitutes a relevant crime, would you want a convicted thief looking after your Granny, or Child, probably not, but what were they convicted of stealing, and would they even remotely consider stealing from a child or an elderly person, probably not, and if they are over 30 they probably stopped stealing when they were in their early 20s. Ultimately a system can't make these decisions, because it can't decide to break the rules, only a human can.

What we really need is a VBS that lessens the burdens of the CRB system, without the draconian implications of the current VBS. Here's a couple of thoughts that went through my head when looking at the system requirements and legislation. What happens if someone's registration is suspended, what assumption will most people spring too. What happens when a drunk school teacher crashes a mini-bus full of kids, do we stop all people with drink related convictions driving children? I think it goes further than just Innocent until proved guilty, because even when proved guilty, you can be redeemed, and people make mistakes with their lives.

This is all well and good but

Why are the charges so high, even e50 is a lot of money, if you haven't got it. Is it because the operators need a brake on usage outside their own networks, because they can't support unlimited bandwidths. Because they don't want everyone using Skype when they are abroad, or what, you would suspect there is a sound commercial reason, or maybe it really is the marketing people thinking they can really stick it to the users, because enough people will forget about the charges to make it worth their while, that is they make more money having insane charges than they would with sane ones. Take tethering on iPhones for example, why?

Well let's hope

O2 will at least match the Vodaphone price, and please can we get rid of the stupid tethering premium. I know I've said it before, but it's stupid that I can use my trusty 6310i with tethering for notheing, but have to pay to use it on my IPhone. Yes I do know I can jail break it quite easily, which makes it odd that O2 are still persisting in charging.

Oh if you wonder why I have a 6310i still in use, it's because I go plac3es camera phones aren't allowed.

And the moral of the story is...

Don't screw with Rupert.

There is no such thing as business at any price. But one has to wonder about the quality of the BSkyB end, not to realise that the deal was duff, or maybe they new, and made the decision to take EDS for a ride.

So how does this compare with government IT procurement failures?

Now the follow-up question would be....

How many council workers abuse their own systems.

Understand your estate

One bit of advice I can give, is before you negotiate your license deal, understand what your needs are, and how to efficiently licence it on the simplest model. Most of the big vendors will do you an Enterprise of Universal license deal which involves a big upfront payment to the vendor to lock in technology for four or five years.

Before you do this better have a good idea when you are going to need those extra licenses, or you will land up paying over the odds. Always base your deal on what you have now licensed the best way, with realistic growth. Make sure you have the right balance between User and Device based licenses. Just because you have 30 CPUs, doesn't mean you need 30 CPU licenses, especially with Oracle. Also understand how Web facing servers relate to internal servers, it may be that a web facing system requires CPU licenses, but that the internal systems it interfaces with do not. I cut £1.5M from a deal by getting that sum right.

The best way to do it, is to model your license requirement, against basic licenses and your asset and user base in Excel, its not that difficult to do for Oracle and Microsoft, overall, for about 40 hours development time, I've probably save £3M on license costs for deals over the past three years. Excluding the others who have taken it on.

Once you have run the licensing through, and have an accurate picture of the license costs, you can cut the holiday from Barbados to Bognor. Sadly, it's often the procurement departments who do these negotiations, and they only need to reduce the cost, not get it right.

(Sorry, I don't do licensing any more, so the spreadsheets are out of date, but hay Reg, if you have an Excel Wizard on the Staff, there's a market niche for you)

Too big

Microsoft is too big to actually do anything really innovative, far too many fingers in far too many pies. Like Oracle and IBM, they have to Borg their innovation. Apple, can think outside the box, select a target, and do different, later, with a better engineer product.

Perhaps Apple should offer Microsoft a $200 dollar life line.

Roll on

The departure of the B Ark.

Sorry does anybody think anymore.

Any government that brought in a law that said no contract would run past the end of their term would plunge the UK into financial chaos. Firstly if we have fixed term parliaments, it will mean we might have several governments over the term of a parliament, and some governments persist either side of an election.

Government contracts do not just cover IT, and there are thousands and thousands of them, so when a new government comes in, it would have to re-negotiate every single contract for everything to EU procurement rules which would ensure that it would take more than six months to re-instate them. Hope you don't need a brain scan or anything important. Oh yes and all the employment contracts would cease as well.

Then tere's all the financial contracts, that would let some people off their obligations to pay, and mean we have to renege on others, can just see what that would do to our triple A rating.

Why would you...

...allow your precious new baby to be exclusive to the worst technology retailer.

1. Coverage

2. Get them to give more prominence to MACs in return.

If you buy your Apples at John Lewis, the prospect of buying early through DSGi won't make you change your retailer, but there aren't as many John Lewis and Apple Store branches put together as there are DSGi outlets, so how do you get bumper sales, any other way.

And we get the last laugh, ching.

A lot of the ID card work was about biometric passports, mostly the relatively small amount of money required in the IT systems to cop with ID cards will probably be retained by the IT companies in penalties. The big bikkies left would be the roll out of enrolment services which may well still be needed, which would have been a lifeline to your local post office.

Any aspiring back bencher want to ask the question "How much did we actually save by canning ID cards" in about 12 months time, bet it won't be much once termination fees have been taken into account. I'll bet it's all covered up by Commercial in Confidence to save embarrassment.

Oh, and I hope that some of our negative commentators out there are in line to loose their jobs when the government cuts back on IT, because a lot of dead wood will be cut from SI IT staffing to accommodate the really good people who worked on ID cards and others, bet you hadn't thought that one through.

So who is going to pay for.....

All the work it will take to get open source products accredited, and security tested by CESG, they don't do it for free.

The bid I'm doing at the moment wants to use open source, they think it means free, but each time we look, the open source products can't pass the accreditation rules, and it isn't compatible with a lot of the existing infrastructure.

A lot of security rules preclude the use of Open Office, because the products that help Office meet the requirements aren't there. If you want to seamlessly integrate your Office product with your EDRMS, you can't because they all interface to Office.

It's a nice idea, but there are some pretty steepmarket entry requirements.

Thing is...

If your 9 year old technology appears to do everything you need it too, and you aren't an IT professional who reads el reg in detail every waking moment of your life, why would you change.

The average person has no concept of how the software market works, and probably doesn't want to have. One suspects that if MS just auto upgraded 6 to 8 very few consumers would complain, if they hid it behind a normal security update.

Companies are a different matter though.

Just to keep the ballance

I've never had any difficulty talking to HMRC or the DVLA, in fact mostly it's the call handling technology that's failed, not the Civil Servant, and both beat the crap out of my Mobile supplier.

Don't expect it to get any better any time soon, expect it to get far, far worse. Departments will not have any money to make things better, in fact the message is shared services, and extend and blend. So we can now look forward to the cheapest services triumphing. DWP will take over the HMRC customer interface and the DVLA will take over NHS direct.

What day is the Greek All Fools Day?

I only ask.

@So that's

Cheaper than a QC

Oh, and Whitehall Civil Servants drink Late from their in-house Starbucks or Costa Coffee, do keep up.

I'm better than you are, ner, ner.....

Seems like a good reason to look at Brocade, then. If Q Logic and Emulex are trying to out do each other by adding more too rapidly, then maybe the little guy is being cautious and producing a stable product that does what you need it too, for less. Just a thought.

Has SAP got the vision?

Sybase is a good database, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that Oracle does, but then who does. Buy Sybase also has some other good tools in its portfolio that SAP could capitalize on.

Oracle underpins a lot of SAP sales, and with Sybase, SAP have an oppertunity to sell the database with the product, or at least say well we'll throw in this excellant commercial database product for peanuts with our product, and save you the cost of the Oracle licence.

Oracle sale people can be quite generous on their technology licences, when there's an apps sale. Now SAP can match that.

Oh and for those really old hands, remember Watcom SQL, which came to Sybase via Powerbuilder. Now there was a great, fully featured SQL database that ran in very little memory, in fact I seem to remember there was a Palm version of it, and was still in the Sybase catalogue last time I looked, but called SYBASE iAnywhere, certainly a hell of a lot more stable than the Oracle offering.

Grown up people

Get tiered of looking at body parts, and leave that to Sun readers. Grown up people also know there is no correlation between normal and excited and that average is not 12", to most woman's relief.

Still we are all different, thank god.

We are a broad church

As a seasoned Lib-Dem, I can tell you that not all within the party happens to be anti-nuclear, as a seasoned human being I can also tell you that there is one hell of a lot of difference between a party manifesto and what the party will actually do, be they Labour, Tory, LibDem or Monster Raving Looney. I am actually a Multi-latteralist and pro-nuclear power, and I don't base my support for the party on the policies I disagree with but on the balance of all policies. It is however a moot point as to the affordability of a new system, just now.

party manifestos are usually documents to get activists excited enough to actually go out an bang on doors, very few people actually read them, in fact I think journalists and commentators are about the only ones who do. Possibly the odd fanatical activist. If you really want some fun at election time memorise all the manifestos, keep them by the door, and challenge anyone who knocks on the dorr to explain the manifesto.

Don't worry, when it comes down to it, saner heads will prevail, and we will land up with a more sustainable mixed energy economy. Either that or we have to encourage about 50 Million of our population to B*gg*r off somewhere else, so that we can be self sufficient in Energy and Food within the UK.

Mind you it is so much easier to peddle doom, gloom and disaster.

Nice to see....

The CEO of Checkpoint has a grasp on the situation, couldn't be that he's hoping to sell more product could it?

Government has been loosing our data since government was invented, we just have a much greater ability to loose a lot of data these days.

CESG are great at coming out with lots of wonderful standards for departments and agencies to adhere to, sadly they never hand out the budget to do it, and often the costs are prohibitive.

So how will it work then.

Does this mean that all cals to company mobiles will have to have a warning about the fact it is being recorded. How do you know you are calling a company mobile?

Oh, and I suspect any off the record calls will be made on personal mobiles, or PAYG phones so what's the point. In fact one would suspect they already do.

Interestingly, one wonders what they will do for people like me who refuse a company mobile and use my own phone, and pay my own bill. I look forward to the first company that intercepts a private mobile without permission.

The Met. did not shutdown the airspace

The Met. publish a model that predicts ash movement which they provide to the civil aviation authorities, who then make a judgement on the information supplied against their standards. They freely admit they can't tell the particle distribution, and that the samples they could take proved accurate.

Airspace is big, and their resources small, would you rather a few airlines had financial difficulties, or a few airliners plunged into the Atlantic. I guess the airlines prefer the latter because they are insured.

Also we have become heavily dependent on one form of aviation transport model, one wonders how much BA wish they still had a fleet of Viscounts for short haul, they may be slower, and fly lower, but they wouldn't be grounded. And isn't their any reason why the airlines didn't jump up and say, give us the tools and we'll fly some sampling flights. i understand the Finns have two F14s that did and are now in need of a severe engine refurb.

Yet again we learn, don't put all your eggs in one basket.

I'm the one with peaceful, and above all quiet back garden where bird twitter is unbroken by aircraft. It's heaven.

Yes, there realy isn't such a thing as Privacy.

Just a lack of publicity.

A company I worked for had an open personnel policy where by you could read anybodies personnel file, apart from health and discipline. The files were right there in the office for you to go and read. No one did, other than for CV purposes, in practice there was no secrecy about anything, and it wasn't an issue, once you got used to it.

With intelligent adults, we mostly, really don't care about what other people do. The problem is, that some element of society and yoof in particular, will focus on any perceived weakness or difference and attack mercilessly, to an extent that makes the tabloid press look like rank amateurs.

Time was, when it didn't matter if someone knew your bank account number, but now for our convenience you can set up direct debits to an account from a company that the is trusted by the banks. The main differentiator is IT, where a little bit of knowledge can be used against you in all sorts of ways.

Post to a minority web site, better be sure there isn't someone who hate your kind just down the road, with enough time to trawl web sites looking for targets, add you to offensive mailing lists and so on.

We can either develop thick skins, or become a homogeneous society where everyone conforms to the norm, or maybe, we just protect the important stuff an leave the rest, and hide amongst the crowd. After all the number of haters is far exceeded by the minorities they hate, and you never know they may just find they are the deviants, not us.

To err is human,

To really %u*& things up yo need a computer.

So far as outsourcing goes, well depends who you use really, at really it comes down to, if you pay peanuts and employ monkeys, then you deserve what you get. Some of us outsourcers know a thing or two about implementing tight IT security, however we don't do it for free. Security device manufacturers charge a massive premium for devices, which we have to pass on to clients.

Virtually all government contracts ask for comprehensive security measures, but when it comes to paying for them, it's another matter. Treasury likes to buy on price, so when up against the budget outsourcing shops, go in with tight security, and you loose.

Where security really is a key decider, even the budget boys have to come to a limited number of companies that know how to do security it do it well.

Oh, and there are separate eMail systems for classified material, just that often people are too lazy to use them, don't have time, or consider the risk of interception to be low. Organizational dynamics play a part as well, it's very easy to criticise from the outside, but quite often it's not the source that's at fault, but the levels above, who want information, but don't want to be bothered with the security.

Get out while the goings good

Cloud computing is in theory a great idea, the ultimate commoditization of the processing function. Maybe he has just realised that there are a few drawbacks to cloud computing in the government environment.

Once you start digging into security, the commercial reality, diversity, performance, change control and so on you could begin to think that maybe clouds should stay in search engines.

G-Cloud will mean that a very few large IT companies will have a strangle hold on government processing. We would tend towards a single OS/Processor architecture, on cost grounds. In the end you would probably land up with HP, Microsoft and Intel running all government computing, and no one else would be able to get in because of the start-up and transition costs. That and the fact that a lot of SMEs and some big names would go to the wall, in the UK.

Diversity is expensive, but actually pushes technology and process forwards, but cost management is a kind of entropy that pushes us towards the lowest common denominator.

Mind you G-Cloud to NOMS, now what's the expression...

Sorry, but...

Isn't that the case for a lot of the world....

One suspects that many households have more Mobile Phones than Toilets, what the UK toilet to phone ratio, how do we compare to our major European competitors.

That Country Estate in HANTS

Is actually Bramshill, the senior officers training college, and the bridge is probably a listed structure.

BTW, it is not in the middle of Basingstoke either, as the Post Code shows it on Google maps.

Oh goody

Now we can have the government run by:

Accenture, IBM and EDS because they are the only companies big enough to stand up the indemnities required.

Not only that, they would land up controlling most of the governments IT spend that's now distributed across a lot of smaller IT companies, so obviously the Tories have decides that small business is a waste of time in government.

Trouble is that with that and Dr. Death's advice, they'll kill a lot of British companies, small medium and large, and we'll see a lot of our Tax revenue leaving the UK.

The post office is tendering...

Bit of a no brainer really, and you wouldn't really want anyone else to do it. The Post Office has by far the greatest reach across the UK, and you could manage it in a single contract. No other organisation has this reach. I suspect that all of the hallowed 5 integrators would have suggested the Post Office, and politically it helps to preserve the network. You have to have biometric registration points within easy reach of all citizens, which counts out supermarket chains and banks, none of which have an even distribution, even within a region.

I suppose Public Libraries, Camelot and Pay Point are the only other organisations with a branch network that could cope, though here there's a substantial overlap with Post Offices.

BTW. The biometric enrolment process has to be monitored by humans to discourage fraud.

Plod & Genghis Khan

Any hierarchical organisation will tend to be right wing, it's not in their nature to be otherwise. ACPO has to be political, because it's there for the benefit of UK policing as seen by Chief Officers, who by the way, are not Police themselves, they are in fact Specials (In more ways than one you might think). Applies to CC, DCC and ACC, and above commander in the met I think. The police depend on politicians for their money, and thus have to play with politicians to ensure that appropriate funding is available.

The idea that we have to elect a CC from a political party, fills me with horror, the US is I believe the only country stupid enough to do this.

The way forward is actually, I think, to have smaller local forces, district/borough, to deal with local crime, and larger regional forces backed up by a national force. The stuff that annoys and frightens us most, tends to be the petty local crime, but the most damaging crime is national and international, and beyond the capabilities of local forces.

Oh, the other thing is that an elected CC would have to be seriously vetted before he could even stand for election, unlike any other electable office. Here's a hint, the best organised crime bosses do not have any kind of criminal record, do you really want to run the risk of having one as a CC, because the human rights act meant he couldn't be stopped without compromising intelligence sources. That kind of person has no problem with terminating grasses on hearsay. Having ex-police officers as CCs does actually mean that they are not criminals, unfortunately it doesn't make them nice people.

Don't forget politicians are not trust worthy, just because they are elected, just popular, even MPs don't get to see sensitive material if they are deemed to be a risk, remember the YES MINISTER where Jim Hacker is selected as the new PM.

Trainline

Discovered that First Crapital Connect rebrand Trainline anyway, I assume others do as well, and charged a booking fee, so I buy my ticket at the station. Sometimes I even use one of those nice multifunction ticketing devices called Human Beings V1.0 who can actually tell you things about which ticket is the best to buy.

I actually use FCC's web site for train information and buying my Car Parking season ticket for which NCP do not charge a premium over the on site machines.

could you .....

Power it with a solar panel? 15L of water an hour would provide a reasonable amount of irrigation for salt tolerant plants. Mind you, how long could your run it for continuously.

So easy to say...

So difficult to do. Why is it people think that putting a computer in the mix makes things:

a) Easier

b) Better

c) Cheaper

d) Quicker

Having worked in IT for 30 odd years, I've found that, for example getting support for a problem is more time consuming than before because a problem that used to be solved by phoning the support desk and having an interactive conversation lasting 10 minutes, now takes five or six message exchanges over a similar number of days.

How they expect to get all the government departments, SIs, Agencies and Authorities to all subscribe to a common portal is beyond me, and the power that the SI running that portal will have will be enormous, you want to add a new portlet, change request, ching.

Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should Gordon. Some of us really like to talk to people you know.

A more deliberate and carefully planned process - what are they on.

Currently most IT procurements in government require a bid process that takes between a year and 18 months, and costs the IT suppliers a lot of money. Think lost opportunity, so a bid team will consist of a minimum of 5 and up. So even if we assume a low salary, your costs are going to be north of £100,000 per person per year.

Behind this there will be a at least 10 departmental employees, and a similar number of consultants. Remember that the department has to go through the process of selecting a supplier from a long list down to a short list of 3 through to contract award.

Usually business change represents at least as much again as the value of the IT contract in costs on the business, but these are usually swept under the carpet.

There are short cut catalogue processes available for smaller or urgent contracts. Actually the 3 month bid cycle for even contracts of £20 - 30 Million works pretty well.

Oh, and the contract price always includes cost recovery for the two contracts the winner didn't win as well as the ones they do.

So one can see that if departments actually start dealing with business change properly, the project costs and bid timescales will extend. Failure rate will go down, not that they are actually that high anyway. In commerce, the CEO can usually say, I like Sharepoint lets implement it across the company through those nice chaps I met at the golf club, a minister, permanent secretary or Agency CEO can't do that.

No it's about....

All the other stuff you need to do to put one in your data centre, and how energy inefficient they are.

BTW. It isn't anything to do with p series chips that reduces your licence costs for CPU based products. It is to do with how the OS domains / partitions CPU usage. Windows & VMWare aren't as good as AiX and Solaris at doing this. You can get the same sort of licence performance out of a Solaris box as you can from a P series because you can set hard limits on CPU usage.

Where P Series scores a bit better is on raw grunt over a Sparc, but that's not as much as it used to be with Sun's multi-threading chip architecture.