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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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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
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.