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back to article Obama's US website woes won't hurt us, says NoSQL Euro chief

MarkLogic's European business chief reckons fallout from US president Obama's online health insurance marketplace won't hinder public sector deals here - and it might even help. The website, HealthCare.gov, is a key part of the 2010 Affordable Healthcare Act, which aims to give millions of uninsured US citizens access to …

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  1. thenim

    Surely...

    "website kept crashing and has been only sporadically unavailable to US citizens trying to log on.." would imply a good thing?

    When infact, it has been a total and unmitigated fucking disaster... :) According to my US colleagues...

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    1. Raoul Miller
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      Re: Surely...

      You shouldn't believe everything you hear or read.

      Yes it's been pretty bad (although it did launch when started and covered the correct scope), but there are plenty of people with political axes to grind who want to make everyone think it is the worst disaster in the world ever. Maybe I'm jaded, but I can think of dozens of government IT websites in the US and UK that never launched at a cost of hundreds of millions to billions each.

      As Paul Krugman said, the Republicans are complaining that affordable healthcare is tyranny and slavery, but also complaining that it is hard to sign up for. What they are really afraid of is that people will realize that whatever the challenges and screw ups, the vast majority of people will be better off than they were last year. Republicans had 40 years to fix healthcare in the US and never did a single thing.

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      1. thenim
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        Re: Surely...

        I'm not talking about the concept, I think there is general agreement (even amongst my Libertarian friends) that the concept is sound, it's the implementation that's been a disaster - I think you have to have deeply rose tinted spectacles to view this as anything but.

        However, this is not uncommon as we've seen the UK, where any government IT project costs at least a billion pounds, typically takes a few more years than planned, and eventually ends up writing off half the assets/costs (for example the new benefits system recently wrote off a cool $200 million, which is a third of the cost of the obamacare thing..) For a small country, we're particularly good at wasting a fuckload of money on hot air...

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    2. Ian Michael Gumby
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      Re: Surely...

      Ok...

      As an Ameriken, [sic]

      Its very easy to bash the ACA over the website. There is a lot wrong with the ACA.

      Having said that...

      There were a lot of things wrong with the website. Far beyond that of MarkLogic.

      First, the website didn't scale.

      Second there were so many holes that it was clear the site wasn't tested at all. period.

      Then add to it the security concerns.

      The lack of the back office connections working,

      The fact that data isn't correctly being sent to the insurance provider...

      Its a mess.

      Did MarkLogic play a role in this mess?

      Most assuredly.

      Do they deserve to take all of the blame?

      No, but the choice of their product over that of a product from a vendor with less risk?

      That's a decision that deserves some scrutiny...

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  2. JayTee253

    Call yourself an architect?

    To the person in charge of HealthCare.gov's technical architecture,

    How stupid can you be? There's a little thing in the business we like to call risk! There are numerous proven and stable patterns/platforms that would ultimately have worked just fine. Anyone who can Google could have worked this out.

    Surely someone somewhere thought, hmm, proven technology company vs yet another nosql wannabe!

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