BT got £106m from £46m contract then won £20m extension on service that overcharged public by £39m

BT has been awarded a £20m contract extension, without competition, on a project that has already ballooned in value by 138 per cent. The telecoms and IT services group has been providing the Northern Ireland Land and Property Services' infrastructure since 1999, and last week it won a further four-year extension to July 2026 …

[Pascal Monett]

It's called lock-in

"There are technical reasons relating to the bespoke and complex nature of the solution which would lead to substantial duplication of costs and unacceptable technical risks which would not allow for the service to be transferred to another supplier "

As the saying goes : when you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will soon follow. So it has happened here.

That said, I'm in a bit of a bind here ; as much as I'd like to make a scathing remark on how BT is screwing its customer, this is a telecomms project. I do not know that there are any Open Source telecomms infrastructures available, so I guess that BT or anyone else would have landed the NLPS in pretty much the same boat.

Is there any other provider available in Northern Ireland ?

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: It's called lock-in

Is it a telecomms service? The description of "a fee-based service for registering and searching land rights in Northern Ireland." makes it sound like a fairly generic database lookup system. I'm sure the usual suspects like Crapita would have been able to do it, and probably overcharged even more.

As for the comment in the article "I can say, with the benefit of hindsight, that if we were doing it now, we would do it differently.", we're talking about the Executive that organized the "cash for ash" business, so permit me to be sceptical.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It's called lock-in

You are right that, based on the article, this is a database, not a telecom system.

But the OP is right that it is yet another example of lock-in.

How many SAP articles about their locked in contracts have we seen? Or, on the hardware side, look at the SLS contracts. In the personal realm there is Facebook or Google or Apple. the list goes on and on.

The 2007 financial crisis popularized the idea that some companies are too big to fail. We are now seeing that some contracts are also too big to fail.

Mission Control on Apollo 13 rightly said "failure is not an option" but in almost all other cases it should be. But it isn't. Hence lock-in.

[Tom 7]

Re: It's called lock-in

So you are saying BT is a monopoly because BT is a monopoly and will forever be so?

[Version 1.0]

Of course no politician's friends own any shares in the companies involved in this (icon).

[Yes Me]

No joke?

Sadly, that very likely isn't a joke.