I almost hate to bring up the California license debacle again, but here it is in the trade press:
infoworld.com
It's meant to be a cautionary tale about how not to go through the procurement process. Unfortunately, while pointing out the errors made by California's Department of Information Technology, it also takes potshots at Oracle.
For example:
Dan Woods, CTO of CapitalThinking, a software provider for the real estate industry in New York, says state negotiators apparently failed to set the tone for developing the contract. "I know the Oracle sales process and their sales people are relentless and extremely well-organized. They knew what they were doing when they took these guys for a ride."
In print, the article, on two facing pages includes a head shot of Woods, and the "...took these guys for a ride" quote.
The article also states that the governor has said he will try to nullify the May 31, 2001, contract and has moved to set up stricter guidelines for purchasing contracts. but fails to mention Oracle's offer to unwind the deal.
Finally, after paragraphs detailing how the state auditor found that Oracle was selling (and it wasn't even Oracle setting up the deal, it was Logicon, an Oracle reseller) California software it didn't want or need, Oracle's point-by-point report of how California would come out ahead as a result of the deal, by Kurt Sjoberg, a former California state auditor (http://www.oracle.com/california/index.html?content.html) is dismissed with the single sentence: For its part, Oracle representatives have insisted that the contract will both save the state money and improve its technology operations.
InfoWorld has been pretty fair in its coverage of Oracle in the past. Oracle's products perform consistently well in technical evaluations by InfoWorld and I believe that the database was even "Product of the Year" a few years ago. I guess that if the point you want to make is that the procurement process failed in this case, you can't present any evidence that maybe this would have been a good deal for California.
-Michael |
