Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by creesch 598 days ago
Replacing SAP for Oracle to me feels like replacing one evil for another.

Besides the companies themselves constantly upselling you and having idiotic licensing terms. Both are very much the sort of companies with products you only are "able" to implement with extremely expensive outside consultants.
1 comments
dole 598 days ago
It's interesting that the third-party consultants hired by the city to implement it aren't named in these articles and "Oracle" is taking the brunt of the blame, much like "Ticketmaster" doesn't care if you don't like them or not, you're going to use them. It's not just Oracle's fault for a 200m pound invoice, and I agree jumping from SAP to Oracle is probably one reason why the customization costs that much more than going from some smaller accounting system.

You have third-party consultants charging for addressing all the mistakes in the system, present on daily chats and constantly chasing them around for support. Oracle's always upselling you on the parts of the system you haven't implemented yet.

The actual municipal employees are making 75% (my own estimate) of what their industry peers make in salary so they're just trying to do their job as they found it, not attempt to replace the status quo with a "solved, open source, one-size-fits-all solution" like so many here believe various ERP systems are. Everything sounds better on paper.

link
creesch 597 days ago
> It's interesting that the third-party consultants hired by the city to implement it aren't named in these articles

It certainly is, here in the Netherlands consultancy companies are often directly mentioned as a cause for a lot similar projects going over budget. Though the government really doesn't seem to be able to do much about it or simply doesn't care. As most recently they appointed the ex vice-president of one of those companies as a state secretary of Digitalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zsolt_Szab%C3%B3_(Dutch_politi...

link