back to article UK Home Office finds £20m to throw at Oracle cloudy ERP

The Home Office has tossed a paltry £20m of taxpayers' cash at Accenture and Oracle implementation outfit Certus Solutions to deploy a cloudy ERP system that hopefully works overhauls the way back-office services are provided. The aim of two-year contract, tendered on the UK.gov’s G-Cloud supplier framework, is to update …

  1. Hans 1
    Happy

    The Oracle is on the Wal

    Well, they have one, they have one ... Oracle have found a customer for their cloudy offering ! I guess Larry will get a new jacuzzi on his yacht ...the sales proles, ohhh ... overshot their targets, thus have negative commissions and must pay back ...

  2. Tim99 Silver badge
    Big Brother

    The number of the beast

    £20 million divided by 30,000 is -£666 or £333 a year, that seem to be worryingly cheap.

    This is Oracle and the Home Department - So a total cost of 100x that?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The number of the beast

      Cheap was my first thought. But then I read "Accenture will take on programme management, business change, technical integration and client reporting needs" so you can rest assured that whatever the final cost is, it won't be 'cheap' and it won't be the £20m quoted.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Richard Hornby, director of finance and estate at the Home Office"

    A quick scout around tells me that Richard has bounced about the public sector for just about his whole career, in sort of finance type roles. No particular evidence of technical knowledge, but I'm sure he can buzz word it up with the very best (cloud = good, that sort of thing). Very fine beard, so respect to him. His degree from the University of Kent is in Theology : this is useful, because only God himself would be able to deliver this on time and on budget, so theological expertise probs more valuable than technical in this instance.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In a year or two....

    ...Oracle will up the cost 10 fold but have them so locked in that won't be able to pull out of the contract (Allegedly. Does that work legally to stop us being sued for comments?)

    No doubt this decision will have been made with no IT environment. They'll have been sold bullshit by the sales rep and believed it (allegedly).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: In a year or two....

      " In a year or two.... ...Oracle will up the cost 10 fold"

      This is NOT the Oracle cost. This is the cost to implement the change over from one lot of Oracle (on prem customized to you-know-where and back so it might as well be bespoke) to Oracle SaaS.

      The Oracle cost was i believe in a previous Reg story. It cant be "upped" because its a per employee per year basis.

      This is standard stuff, you buy your s/w or rent your SaaS from Vendor A, then you go out to Vendors A through Z to come up with an implementation cost and a business change cost.

      And since Vendor A in this case is Oracle, its implementation costs are not the cheapest, so they picked someone cheaper or in this case, Accenture AND someone cheaper. Hopefully not too much cheaper because IME "too cheap" ends up in the end as ... ...... ..... 10x the cost :-)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I read it as saying that they're planning to save money on the computer stuff by changing how all their departmental processes work to make them fit an off-the-shelf product - Accenture's involvement is presumably as high-paid consultants whose presence will be used to justify the resulting extra hassle to the junior workers actually affected.

    Back to the 1970s, basically.

    1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

      Back to the 1970s, basically.

      Well, that's all the Cloud is, isn't it? Just a big data processing centre that you rent time on.

  6. wyatt

    Muppets, don't they read El Reg? Someone in IT must do with enough clout to have stopped this unless there's a backhander or two floating about?

  7. a_yank_lurker

    What Will Go Wrong

    With an insultant and Leisure Larry working this fiasco something will go horribly wrong. The Three Stooges would more competent than these three.

  8. EnviableOne

    not the biggest

    the NHS ESR system runs on Oracle and thats a lot larger than the home office

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