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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> Oracle is paying off every politician in sight / RE: How Oracle screwed California
ORACLE-L Digest -- Volume 2002, Number 120
> ------------------------------
>
> From: Steven Lembark <lembark_at_wrkhors.com>
> Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 09:30:40 -0500
> Subject: RE: How Oracle screwed California
>
> -- "Boivin, Patrice J" <BoivinP_at_mar.dfo-mpo.gc.ca>
>
> > I don't know if Microsoft negotiates -- do they negotiate?
>
> Quite. They make Norton Simon look like a pushover. See
> coverage of the recent trial for examples.
>
The California State University system negotiated some pretty good education discounts from MS. In the CSU case, Microsoft wasn't pushing their products, the CSU was begging MS to give the discounts (or so the legend goes).
Previous negotiations with Novell were a giant pain, so Novell got dumped when NT4 became viable as a LAN/intranet server alternative to Netware (this was at the time that a transition from Netware v3 to v4 was being contemplated, along with a fairly vast expansion of the number of server boxes).
fwiw, CSU separately licensed Oracle, and has never been involved with DOIT, unDOIT, or any of that nonsense as far as I know. Oracle gave CSU a pretty good education discount also.
Don't forget that as the DOIT fiasco was progressing, the branch of Northrop Gruman (Logicon?) that was hired by DOIT to study the State's Oracle licensing ended up getting $28 million of the $41 million "overcharge"!
Note that the State Employee Union was complaining about DOIT's handling of Oracle licenses in AUGUST 2001!!!
http://www.calcsea.org/csd/committees/IT/20010830-oracle.asp (contains broken links)
California State Auditor's (scathing) report (109 pages):
---excerpts---
http://www.bsa.ca.gov/bsa/pdfs/2001128.pdf
...
| According to its director, beginning in June 2000, | representa-tives of the Department of Information Technology | (DOIT) | attended meetings at which state chief information officers | (CIOs) expressed concern with how much their respective | departments were paying to license and support software. Because | of these concerns, in that same month, DOIT contracted with | Logicon Inc. (Logicon), a software reseller and provider of IT | sys-tems and support services, to review industry best practices | for enterprisewide software licensing and provide a report | delineating alternative licensing strategies for the State to | consider. Although DOIT received a draft, Logicon never | completed the report, and DOIT ultimately cancelled the contract | on November 30, 2001. Between February and May 2001, Logicon | made a series of sales presentations for representatives of | DOIT, General Services, and the Department of Finance (Finance). | Included in at least one of these presentations was a document| in which Logicon suggested the State employ it to negotiate an | ELA with Oracle.
...
---end excerpt---
Here is the thinking of one of Sacramento's venerable political corruption analysts, journalist Dan Walters:
http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/2436460p-2880957c.html
---begin excerpt---
Dan Walters: Davis, top aides scramble to avoid onus for Oracle contract debacle
By Dan Walters -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Tuesday, April 30, 2002
It's amusing, in an appalling sort of way, to watch Gov. Gray Davis and his top aides scramble to shun responsibility for the Oracle Corp. computer software scandal.
This is, after all, a governor who has boasted that he controls virtually every decision made in his administration -- who, in fact, has profanely berated underlings who did something without his approval.
It stretches credulity to the snapping point for Davis' spinners to insist that the governor was completely unaware that his administration was signing a massive software deal with Oracle, especially because Oracle delivered a $25,000 campaign contribution to the Democratic governor's treasury just days after the contract was signed.
The $95 million contract, for software that few in state government apparently wanted in the first place, first surfaced in a San Jose Mercury News article, and a couple of weeks ago, the state auditor's office issued a scathing report, suggesting that rather than saving money, as Oracle has claimed, the software may wind up costing the state many extra millions of dollars.
The audit report touched off the finger-pointing scramble. During a Legislative Audit Committee hearing, heads of three state agencies disclaimed responsibility for evaluating the software, each saying that he assumed that someone else had done it.
Subsequently, the least politically secure of the three, General Services Department Director Barry Keene, was sent packing. Keene is a former state senator whose erratic personality and lack of administrative experience ill-suited him for the job in the first place. Making Keene the sacrificial lamb (Keene suggested that his marital woes may have contributed to his attention deficit) suited Davis better than dumping Finance Director Tim Gage, whom Davis needs to get through the state budget crisis, or Elias Cortez, who heads the Department of Information Technology.
Cortez would be the more appropriate official to hold responsible for the Oracle debacle because his department was created to guard against such expensive technology mistakes, but Davis had already fired several high-ranking Latino officials and could ill-afford another incident, especially because the Legislature's most vociferous guardian of Latino affairs, Sen. Richard Polanco, was supporting Cortez.
The question remains, however: What did Davis know and when did he know it? Claims of gubernatorial ignorance are undercut by revelations that one of Davis' closest aides, Susan Kennedy, signed off on a memo summarizing the contract. Keene, in fact, testified that Steve Nissen, the head of Davis' reinventing government initiative, had urged him to speed up the contract. A few months later, Nissen left the administration for a position with a Los Angeles law firm, headed by former national Democratic Chairman Charles Manatt, that also represents Oracle in the software dispute.
Despite all of this, the governor's official mouthpieces insist that Davis knew nothing of the pending contract and that there is no connection between it and the hefty campaign contribution.
Audit Committee Chairman Dean Florez, a Democratic member of the Assembly from Fresno, commendably resisted pressures to avoid embarrassing the governor. Florez wants to schedule additional hearings on the debacle, and it will be interesting to see if Herb Wesson, the newly minted Assembly speaker, sanctions a wider probe. Wesson is a Davis loyalist who also received a $10,000 contribution from Oracle last year.
Davis, as part of his effort to deflect attention from himself, says he wants Attorney General Bill Lockyer to investigate what happened. But Lockyer received a $25,000 check from Oracle less than a month after the contract was signed last May, and leaving it to Lockyer is a surefire way to keep the matter bottled up until after the election.
The Legislature should pursue this matter vigorously -- as vigorously as it did the scandal enveloping former Republican Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush -- but if it is unwilling to do so, perhaps the U.S. attorney's office should be brought into the case.
---end---
-- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Eric D. Pierce INET: PierceED_at_csus.edu Fat City Network Services -- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists -------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).Received on Tue Apr 30 2002 - 14:04:37 CDT
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