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NHS Awards Contract to Microsoft
ChocLinux writes "Microsoft has won a £500m nine year contract to supply software to the NHS, a week after the OGC (the government procurement body) released a report describing Linux as a viable desktop alternative for the majority of government users."
I think "Microsoft has also agreed to carry out £40m of research and development to provide guidelines and toolkits that will allow ISVs to deliver an NHS-specific user interface" is the candy here.
MS probably knows it can still compete in customised applications with its almost unlimited resources.
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Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Only because the roll-out and retraining of hundreds of I.T. staff would have cost them millions in time and lost productivity. This is not entirely surprising, and the primary reason that Linux and open source OS's are not being adopted by the main stream large organisations. It has nothing to do with the stability,functionality and quality of the actual products.
NHS - National Health Service
OGC - Office of Government Commerce
£500 million - $924 million
.
Even if Linux is better/cheaper/faster...
Decisions like that one from the NHS take a lot of time and effort. The sales cycle is measured in years. Microsoft excels at this process. They have people talking to people and organizations constantly, feeding them material to show their bosses and committees.
Who is making the corresponding effort for Linux?
So Bleasdale, open source advocate in UK, gets it absolutely right. The current system is already based on MS products, and to try to replace that with Linux all at once would cost more than the half a billion pounds that the new Microsoft license costs.
However, NHS probably doesn't need all those licenses and MS has them over a barrel with regards to the number of licenses (though expanded by almost 100% in this latest contract). The great number of "cheap" licenses is a disincentive to move to other currently non-supported platforms.
The key here is that Microsoft has no hold on them to stay with Windows in the long run. Every 3 years the contract comes up for reapproval and during that time if NHS deems it worth switching some systems to Linux, then they can renegotiate for fewer MS licenses at that time. After 9 years, you'd hope that NHS has implemented a solid system framework that can handle a heterogeneous environment of Windows and Linux systems.
That said, I fail to see how choosing Linux doesn't result into 'lock in'. At least to any extent greater than with Microsoft Windows. Support for Windows can be had from any consulting agency, pretty much. Support for Windows by private consulting companies is far greater in numbers than support for Linux. Linux of course is not tied to a single vendor, but then again it isn't really that big a deal whether the money goes to Redhat or Microsoft, is it?
The fact is that they will need service on the systems whether they be Windows or Linux. In the short term, Linux is more painful because of the upfront application porting costs involved in switching, but in the long term Linux is still more expensive because of the higher cost support fees demanded by non-Windows consultants.
This contract is a win/win for all involved. NHS gets the systems it needs, Microsoft gets a boatload of money, and Linux advocates are not barred from introducing Linux systems into the NHS systems.
The contract was probably written and approved long before the study was made available... So why try and stir up yet another controversy with such a starkly contrasting headline?
From personal experience, government contracts like that can often take years to design and bid.
Well, I'm not terribly surprised that a contract would be awarded to Microsoft, especially if they are the current provider, but nine years!? That's more than a bit extreme. Three would have made sense, as that's the average lifespan of a Microsoft OS before Microsoft starts reducing support when the new release comes out.
A lot can happen in nine years. Nine years ago we we had just been formally introduced to Windows 95. Most of our programs were sixteen bit and didn't support long filenames. The average hard disk drive size was something like 400MB. Most new computers had eight, maybe sixteen megabytes of memory. 14400 bps modems were the shit, and vampire-tap thicknet and token ring were the most common network types. Hell, arcnet and Banyan Vines were still viable.
The biggest thing is that Microsoft wasn't the absolutely overwhelming player that it is today. Many of the big box stores that carried computers had just as many Apple Performas and Quadras as all of the PCs of different brands combined on display. OS/2 could be found on a few machines set up as customer displays displays. Microsoft was not the overwhelming monopoly that it subsequently worked to become. With the headway that non-Microsoft platforms have been making (along with the convergent evolution of Apple's OS along with the other POSIX-alike OSes), nine years from now Microsoft might not be the juggernaut that they are today.
Already Microsoft is suffering from the rot that any middle-aged empire goes through, just look at the constant, gaping holes in IE, IIS, and Windows that leave users burned by automated attacks time and again. Eventually the right people will become pissed off and the rate of corporate adoption of non-MS software will increase further than it already has.
Nine years is just way too long.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Dear Slashdot Editor,
Please approve only uplifting stories the rest of the week. I think we've had enough bad news already.
Sincerely,
Bummed about Bush
"The next 4 years could have been great leaps. Now they will be small steps."
A few years ago, pirating MS software in the government sector was relatively commonplace. Along comes Microsoft and says: "Either you commit to our systems, or we force and audit and retrospectively sue your arse off for breach of copyright."
:v)
Lo and behold, government departments find themselves locked into expensive Microsoft "deals" thereafter, even though FOSS would be more beneficial to them.
Paranoid delusions? Well, it's not a decision based on the quality of the code, or the support, and it's not the TCO.
Vik
Windows 1.0 came out in I think 1984, Windows 3.0 came out in 1989. How many large-scale industrial contracts did Windows win then? Zero. How did Windows get to this point? It started with replacing departmental level servers and workgroups, and proved itself there for ten years or so.
So, Linux should do the same. Can't expect to be birthed ready to run a marathon.
This isn't the right situation to even think about implementing open source software. The system is already running on MS software, and it would be financial suicide to switch the whole thing over to an entire new system, due to labor costs, retraining, etc. As much as I dislike microsoft, if I was making the decision here and I already had a big system based off MS's products, I'd choose to stay with MS.
Thankfully none of the medical equipment is going to be running Microsoft products. Otherwise, people would really get the blue screen of death.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
Modded troll in minutes. Record time. Congratulations to those who choose to cover their ears and chant "la la la la la".
In part because it was largely an anecdote that ran counter to a lot of peoples experiences of modern distros. I could tell you horror stories I had with trying to install Windows on a machine and failing to get it to boot properly for hours trying all manner of things - the problem eventually solved by booting the damn thing with GRUB instead of the windows bootloader. That doesn't mean Windows sucks nor that it isn't ready for the desktop, it just means I had a sucky experience.
If you could actually cite some clear specific reasons (as opposed to vague "everything is unstable/broken/hard" or anecdotes of something not working right for you that usually works fine for everyone else) people might actually listen. You could try making arguments about the ease of 3rd party software installation, or the current infancy of the efforts to provide compatability between KDE and GNOME apps, or the lack of certain significant applications for various major fields (accounting, CAD, whatever), or the lack of Linux support from hardware manufacturers. Then again, all of those issues are undergoing steady improvement, or could change rapidly if there was any significant uptake of Desktop Linux, so maybe they don't let you rant quite the way you want...
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
England changed massivly during the second world war. Although food supplies became for more limited because they were now rationed out the fast majority of people actually got a better diet. It also saw the start of the National Health Service. The idea that everyone should have access to the same kind of good medical care without having to pay huge bills. To the americans, this is not such a bad idea because healthy workers can worker harder and longer.
However a NHS is also expensive. Of course the long, intelligent and complex view is that like a public transport system or social services they kinda pay for themselves. While they do not make a profit it is because they reduce the cost of others. A NHS makes sure people are sick less often and don't die so early so they can pay taxes as workers for longer. This is simple. Every kid costs the state money. The same amount wether this kid is a tax payer for 20 years or 40 years. Public transport takes people of the roads. For all those car drivers cursing about money spend on trains while you are stuck in traffic. Just imagine how long the jam would be if the people in the train were on the road with you.
However certain types of goverment seek election by promising to lower taxes. This works on the simple minded voter. You can't of course lower taxes without spending less and the NHS or public transport are easy targets. Invest a little bit later. Freeze salaries. What will it hurt for 1 term of office eh?
England now has an NHS wich is a shadow of its former self. "Efficiency" programs have the amount of managers running out of control while the NHS is bleeding developing nations of its nurses while british nurses are going stateside (language is a problem but the pay is better). Health care has gone down the crapper again with it costing more and more for those who are least capable of paying for it.
Funny thing is that all those cuts on the NHS happened to lower taxes. I wish I could have everyone who voted for lower taxes and who ended up with a higher monthly burden flogged in public for being to stupid to live. Get a clue, it don't matter what you taxation is. What matters is the monthly bill. Simple example. $100 tax bill + $0 medical bill vs $50 tax bill $100 medical bill. Doesn't tax an economic genius to figure out wich is cheaper eh?
Anyway Blair is a MS fanboy and the NHS is famous for making the totally wrong decission. Buying MS at huge costs because it is cheaper seems business as usual.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So what? It's not like Red Hat will answer the phone, or return your phone calls, even when all you want to do is throw money at them.
Exercise for the reader: figure out who your Red Hat rep is and ask them for a price quote on one of their products. Get this done within two weeks. Ready... go.
Essentially it seems like that they are getting operating systems, office products, servers/server software for about 60 pounds per machine per year, which I presume includes some level of support and 40 million of custom software.
Open Source if not quite ready for prime time, is already showing its power in competetive situations..
actually, judging from the numerous "warning to users of [x] - [y] doesnt compile under new kernel" posts everytime news of a new kernel gets posted to /., it seems to me that ms's backwards compatibility record is alot better than linux's
I mean, this is an organisation that only recently ditched X.400 email. Most of their practices are either paper-based, or use outmoded legacy systems that no-one understands anymore, because the coders responsible for their creation have been downsized long ago.
Hardly anything is designed with interoperability in mind ; I have personally resorted to screen-scraping chunks of VT100 terminal output because the other supplier had no handle on their ancient pathology system (and possibly didn't even have the sourcecode).
The resistance to change is enormous, and not without justification; the overall experience of NHS professionals of IT projects is bad.
And why? Healthcare is almost certainly one of the most challenging problem domains for IT projects in existence. Not only does it require the reliability and robustness of the banking industry, the informational complexity of the subject matter exceeds most other problem domains in human usage. Even the everyday things like the prescription and administration of drugs are horrendously complex ; the computerisation of a full medical record is something that I would describe as more challenging than a dozen Manhattan Projects.
In all, this is an area where the potential benefits are tremendous - even a small reduction of the estimated 70% of working time that a junior doctor spends doing paperwork instead of caring for patients would be an enormous boon. An hour a week saved per ward (very realistic even with basic electronic prescribing systems) essentially amounts to an average sized hospital getting a free doctor. In a cash-strapped, overburdened NHS, every little thing helps.
The potential for public benefit is enormous, and I would suggest that this should be a matter for public research. Instead of pouring these funds into the pockets of shareholders of enormous foreign companies, gov.uk should found a number of public projects, all bound over to interoperate freely, all open-source, and trial them.
But unlikely to happen, with the corporates back-handing government so effectively. With the recent funding changes for NHS IT, the funds are effectively placed in the hands of a very few huge monolithic corporations, who then decide who to subcontract to. As a result, smaller, more innovative companies are either shoved out of their niche, bought out, or try to compete on an equal footing with the giants and get crushed in the scrum. Money will haemorrhage into the pockets of foreign shareholders (iSoft, Schlumberger-Sema, etc.).
Yet another reason I'm glad I no longer work for the NHS.
Maybe the NHS Trust I work for, as part of the Web Development Team, is an exception, but Linux is making inroads here. For example, while our Intranet presently runs on IIS and we do have a large number of third party applications that require IIS, signficant areas (like our homegrown document publishing system) take advantage of having a Linux server in the mix.
Likewise, I often get involved with extracting useful data from huge data sources and Linux provides me with an efficient and effective way to do that. It's not just me, either. Our network still has a Novell backbone and that is of course moving towards Linux, thanks to SuSE.
It is, of course, a far cry from Linux on every desktop but the penguin is definitely in there, helping to get the work done.
Wulf
Soundcheck Poem: 1 2 was a racehorse and 1 1 was 1 2. 1 2 1 1 race and 1 1 1 1 2.
Just in case anyone has forgotten, here's a quick summary of recent major state-funded IT projects in the UK:
3 33 .htm
Immigration service document system (1999) - 18 months late, cost £77m, scrapped after 2 years because system couldn't cope with load
National Insurance system (1997) - delivered late, didn't work, caused a 14 million record backlog, delayed pensions payouts in 1999 and lost 5.2 million people's tax files
Passport office(1999): new system less efficient than what it replaced, caused a backlog of half a million applications, price of passport put up by 30% to fund development of replacement system
Air traffic control(1999): six years late, crashed three times in eight days after installation, complaints from controllers about difficulties with the system.
So, combine the system that created those blunders and Microsoft, a company with a terrible track record on reliability and honesty. I hope I don't need to go to hospital any time soon.
Source:http://www.computerweekly.com/Article102
>>GPs and other health workers that are leaving the NHS in their droves for the private health sector.
Where's your research for this statement? My wife is a Surgical Matron at a hospital with responsbility for four wards and a lot of staff. She hasn't lost ONE member of staff to the private sector.
The private sector is not everything is cracked up to be for medical professionals. The management is often poor, and professional development may be limited for Nursing Staff [not much point in specialising in A&E in a Private Hospital - there isnt any]. Consultants are invariably employed by the NHS and top-up their income with private work. Their is no way their is enough private work in the UK to pay the salaries of all the consultants.My wife only got her own desktop pc in the last year. For the last 5 years before that she has had to ALL of her paperwork on our pc at home or else beg or borrow access to someone else's at work - and she STILL spent three hours on paperwork at home last night.
The NHS IT infrastructure has been neglected on a national level for years - at last something is [hopefully] being done to correct that failing.
The NHS has 9 years remaining of the largest IT project in the world today. The cost is somewhere in the region of £30 billion. The country has been split into different regions, each with a very large IT services company running the show (BT consulting, CSC, Accenture etc). Ther job is to integrate the old systems and bring on new ones to allow patient details to be shared nationally. It is a massive project, £500 million goes to Microsoft to ensure that they will support TODAYS operating systems to the end of the programme so they can get the hard job of getting it all up and working before the OS gets pulled out from underneith them. Once the system works they are in mantience mode and can port it onto the latest and greatest of the day. They have some very very old applications that only run in Windows inside of the NHS today, and they are part of the clincial application suite. The truth is that the NHS believes that Windows is unlikely to disappear in the next 9 years, I think that is a fair assumption myself. Unfortunately they have to think that long term since their software really is that complex. Besides it's all about value, redeveloping the current systems that do work will cost more than paying the licence fees.
new kernel gets posted to /., it seems to me that ms's backwards compatibility record is alot better than linux's
As someone who remembers downloading SLS Linux one floppy at a time from a BBS over a mighty 2400 baud modem, I recall that once I got the base installed, I used Minicom, gzip, tar, and bash in my efforts.
To my knowledge, there is no SLS Linux anymore, BBSes are either gone, or moved to the Internet, 2400 baud modems are considered intolerably slow (and are only supported as a fallback protocol that is almost never used). I still use all of those apps. I used fvwm as my window manager once I had X up. Fvwm is still available today should I choose to use it. I can use it with gtk even though gtk wasn't even thought of when fvwm was the default window manager. I recently switched from XFree86 to Xorg. Nothing else had to be changed.
When the Internet started to be available to non-university students, I got a shell account. I used Slirp to make it act like a slip account. It's still available.
I still have a few disks with DOS/Windows software from the same era, but it's useless because it won't run on a recent Windows OS.
Perhaps you don't hear much about it when a new Windows breaks old apps because it's not news. It's just par for the course. Or it may be that you don't hear about it because there's nothing to discuss. Nobody has the source, so nobody needs to know what to change to fix it. Nobody is deciding if it's worth the effort to update it because nobody has a way TO update it. It's just gone.