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Oregon Withholding $25.6M From Oracle Over Health Website Woes

Posted by Soulskill on from the all-about-the-benjamins dept.

itwbennett writes "Oregon is holding back $25.6 million in payments from Oracle (out of some $69.5 million Oracle claims it is owed) over work the vendor did on the state's troubled health care exchange website. The site was supposed to go live on Oct. 1 but its launch has been marred by a slew of bugs and it is not yet fully functional. This week, Cover Oregon said it had reached an agreement with Oracle laying out 'an orderly transition of technology development services, and protects current and future Cover Oregon enrollees,' according to a statement. Oregon officials reached the deal with Oracle after the company reportedly threatened to pull all of its workers off the project and essentially walk away."

13 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Good if they succeed. by Z00L00K · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Too many companies deliver sub-standard software without any risk at all, especially in big projects.

    Mistakes do happen, but underbidding is too common.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    1. Re:Good if they succeed. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Too many public services that were privatized under the guise of saving money now cost the public more money than when they were publicly run. Turns out 'privatization' is a euphemism for 'funnel money in to my campaign contributor's pockets'

    2. Re:Good if they succeed. by tomhath · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A lot depends on what the developers are given to work with. It sounds like Oracle salesmen talked Oregon into buying a hodge podge of stuff that supposedly bolted onto Siebel. When that kind of technical decision is made based on what the salesman gets a commission on it usually doesn't turn out well.

    3. Re:Good if they succeed. by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Clearly you've never worked with Oracle. The states biggest mistake was hiring them.

    4. Re:Good if they succeed. by TENTH+SHOW+JAM · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No. It sounds to me like there were competent contract managers who simply asked for things to work out of the box like the sales droids said they would. When they failed that test, then they applied the stick to the carrot.

      Oracle (Bless their little hearts) got a bit peeved that they would now have to earn their money rather than just grab the money and run. Things came to a head. Some negotiation happened and a way forward was worked out. Oracle will get paid when they deliver a product that meets a defined level of quality. In exchange, Oregon will lower the level of quality appropriately.

      This sort of thing happens all the time in government contracts. I get to deal with these things reasonably regularly. When money is tight, even governments expect value for money. The IT firms sometimes have some adjustment to do.

      --
      A sig is placed here
      To display how futile
      English Haiku is
    5. Re:Good if they succeed. by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 3, Funny

      "I will disagree wholeheartedly"

      OK. Just let us know when you get around to it! I do have one question, though ... why the hell don't you just disagree now? Procrastination issues?

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
  2. Sounds Nice by johnnyb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Must be nice to be able to fail at a project such that they owed you $69 million, but you don't actually have to make it work.

    Perhaps states should make a rule stating that large projects must be broken up into deliverables of $1 million increments.

    --
    Engineering and the Ultimate
  3. Sounds like a good idea to me by viperidaenz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Just one more thing though.
    Oracle should pull all of its workers off the project and walk away after giving back all money already paid.
    If you don't deliver what you've been told to deliver, you shouldn't get paid.

    1. Re:Sounds like a good idea to me by MrEricSir · · Score: 4, Funny

      If you don't deliver what you've been told to deliver, you shouldn't get paid.

      Poor Larry would be living in a cardboard box on the sidewalk in a week if Oracle had to issue a refund every time they failed to meet a delivery.

      --
      There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
  4. Oracle Services by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't have any personal experience with Oracle the company. But I've spoken to a half-dozen or so of their clients, and not one of them has ever had a successful completion of a project, and they've all gone over budget. Purely anecdotal evidence, I know.

    I'd be interested to hear if someone has had a good experience working with Oracle...? But if the overwhelming consensus is negative, how do they continue to gain new clients?

    1. Re:Oracle Services by penix1 · · Score: 3, Informative

      But I've spoken to a half-dozen or so of their clients, and not one of them has ever had a successful completion of a project, and they've all gone over budget. Purely anecdotal evidence, I know.

      I could tell you from a West Virginia perspective it isn't good:

      http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

      And that's not anecdotal evidence.

      --
      This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
  5. what is so hard about this? by mattis_f · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's an honest question. I am a programmer of embedded systems and microcontrollers, my expertise is at the other end of the computing spectrum.

    As much as I like to blame Oracle, the state may have added serious requirements at the last minute that complicated everything. These articles doesn't say anything about it. Same seems to go for all the troubled exchanges - so what's the problem?

    Is there anyone on here with some insight?

  6. HAHAHAHA by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Informative

    As a customer of Oracles, and having these very same products including Sieble... all I can say is "You should have asked me first"

    This is exactly what we're going through. They sold us a suit of "integrated software products" that were in no-way integrated or even related. They charged us to configure the software, then when the software didn't work, told us it was configured wrong. Then when it was time for a new contract tried to exempt themselves from liability for "Configuration changes" and threatened to not renew and not fix the issue unless we did sign. (we didn't and almost ended up in court)

    Then when they were making changes their support teams would log into their software through various back doors and make changes without notifying us, leaving a trail in the audit log with "NULL" in the place where the user account that made the change was supposed to be logged. They remotely modify white lists into the application suite without permission despite specific contractual agreements that they would not. We've got Oracle Employees whitelisting their home DSL accounts and logging in at random at all times of the day.

    Oracle is the worst Vendor I've ever worked with. They are incompetent, malicious, vindictive and will outright lie, con and steal from their customers. They literally deprecated our ODBC connection to a SASS once because we weren't going to renew our contract and they wanted to charge us to move the data off their systems. Luckily we had planned for such a thing and already had a replication database in-house. God I hate Oracle.