Bank of England Oracle Cloud bill balloons – but when you print money, who's counting? The Bank of England has nearly doubled the money it is dedicating to partner spending for an Oracle cloud transformation, which it began imagining in 2020. According to a recently published procurement note, the 330-year-old institution said it was increasing the contract value awarded to its Oracle implementation partner …
That's only possible in a parallel universe where government will pay competitive salaries, and there's political acceptance of insourcing IT, neither apply here.
What is more worrying is that BoE are spending about £14m to implement a few Oracle ERP back office modules for processes that HM Treasury already have a solution that's almost certainly Oracle.
To be fair to the BoE, if you use "the Cloud" as operating model and decide to put more workload on it (more servers, more storage, more bandwidth, ... ) a pay-as-you-go contract becomes more expensive automatically.
Would be the same at Azure, AWS, Google, etc.
Would even be the same on-premise, if you ned to use more server, storage racks, etc.
I would much rather that BoE (or any organ of state) paid for services within our shores:
• generate employment here - which will be taxable
• use skills of people here which will:
•• encourage more Brits to become skilled up
•• enable us to better compete for such projects internationally
• keep sensitive data within the UK
Unfortunately: this requires joined up thinking - which is in short supply.
Terry Pratchett's Making Money the "Men of the Sheds" in particular.
Never thought I would live in world where the fictional peculiar government and institutions of Ankh-Morpork would be the envy of most contemporary states. I imagine one the more notable of that city's guilds would be overwhelmed with contracts were it were present today in this world. The Thieves Guild was always present here and has enjoyed unprecedented success in recent times.
The glass computer in the Bank's basement was unnervingly prescient of Pratchett.
That glass computer was based on an early experiment with analog modelling of the economy that was based on fluid flow, the "Phillips Machine". These days I believe they still use fluid dynamics for economic modelling but its done on boring old digital computers.
... whether I have misread this article.
It seems that BoE contracted with a systems integrator, "Version 1", who, according to their website are "trusted cloud transformation experts with a future-focused, value-led approach and deep sector experience." So shouldn't they take some/most/all of the blame? Certainly back in my implementation days for several SIs, if stuff went belly up, it was our fault (happily the only real belly up I was aware of was when Oracle blatantly lied during the pre-sale and promised far, far more than it could deliver. I wasn't involved in the pre-sale so have no idea how come the the pre-sale was done by Oracle with us as the implementation organisation. Or maybe we sent our sales team who only cared about the size of their commission.
"in September 2023 in a deal set to last 55 months, with the option to extend for a further 24 months"
Then what?
Spend another £1 Billion moving to another system (initial project cost put at 3 shillings and Six Pence)
Or pay the licence fees that will be double what they are now because, well what you going to do? Move?
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