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Laughing Larry buys another flotilla of carbon fiber hydrofoil catamaran yachts.

This is Oracle's MO. Surprised they found yet another sucker in this day and age.

The classic Bryan Cantrill diagnosis is more than decade old.

Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of your lawnmower..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728

Oracle is a red herring in this story. Mismanagement seems to be the real issue. As it is commonly.
Government need to stop blaming failures of society on anything, anything at all -- anything that isn't them.
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> Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe

.... How!?

And why move to Oracle of all vendors from SAP? Cost reasons? Why not workday and/or Salesforce?

Peoplesoft/Oracle ERP has had over 30 year of experience selling to local governments globally.

When dealing with procurement in countries that aren't the US, riles and regulations are much more difficult and unintuitive, and also provide marginal RoI.

This is why companies like Workday and Salesforce don't care to compete with Oracle or SAPs in these kinds of contracts - they don't have the right relationships with channel partners and systems integrators needed.

When a city council places a tender for an ERP system, they won't be doing the work in-house due to regulatory and budget allocation reasons. Instead they'll farm out the work to local contractors, MSPs, and Systems Integrators instead.

PLG driven companies like Workday and Salesforce dislike working with SIs and MSPs as much because channel partners don't care about upselling features in the products they bought - they wanna keep the customer satiated instead.

Also, the dollars spent getting the contract might not have a significant RoI when factoring the contract size itself.

>.... How!?

Everywhere else has had the sense to create smaller local ruling bodies.

Not the entire truth - they also have a £700 million equal pay settlement to pay out.
Great. That’s where the tax money went, and thats where they’ll go again once raised.

Really the only option for the uk is to let people decide what to do with the money, by lowering taxes and focusing on the essentials.

The notion that we can perpetually increase taxes to patch gaps left by poor management is ridiculous.

I'd fire the entire city council for making dumb decisions.
How do you fire elected officials?
Better ask, how to elect officials who are not a dumb to procure a $125M HR product for a 1.15M population city. i.e. a >$100 product for every resident in the city?

I bet if you fund a startup for $1M, they'll deliver a way better product than the $125M one!