Knowing me knowing Norfolk County Council...
...it will end up costing twice that! But the local useless Archant press will never bother to investigate.
Aha!
Aha. Norfolk County Council, the UK local government authority based in Norwich, has awarded contracts for an organisation-wide ERP upgrade to Oracle and "service partner" Insight Direct. The deal, which includes £13.5m for Big Red and £4.4m for the reseller-cum-integrator, promises a fully integrated ERP SaaS system including …
Oh dear. Give it a couple of years and I fully expect them to be tendering again. I can guarantee this will not go well. I keep wondering where Oracle are getting the customers still and why their new customers have not done enough due diligence on this company.
Unfortunately, thanks to the way councils have to procure services by law, Oracle probably had a crack team working on fitting the procurement criteria to the letter and deep enough pockets to price everyone else out. I don't think there's anything a council can do to account for the fact that a company are known to be utterly shite on their application. They'd have more than likely had no choice but to go with them. I bet their IT department are absolutely dispairing.
No, it shouldn't be "expected" - the exact date should be specified and written in blood, along with clauses that dictate increasing daily penalties for Oracle for every day they fail to deliver a workng system past that date until the amount payable per day bankrupts them.