I know hating on Oracle is en vogue, but I struggle to believe this $600M figure.
a. I use to work in this space, even a $6M deal would be massive (let alone something 100x bigger).
b. The ENTIRE cuny budget in 2013 was only $2B [0]. This isn't their IT budget, this is literally the entire budget to run the entire university system across multiple campus, faculty, buildings, etc.
c. Because Higher Ed is known to be so cheap, especially in the late 00s - big tech companies charged accordingly (which was at a massive discount relative to most other accounts).
d. even if this $600M figure was an aggregated figure over multiple years, staffing and auxiliary costs - it still wouldn't come close to this figure.
e. an expenditure this large would definitely be called out in CUNY annual financial reports, and I can't seem to find any reference to it.
[0] https://www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/media-assets...
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EDIT: I did find reference last year to a $175M funding request to migrate from on-prem PeopleSoft (Oracle) to cloud.
Though, what I've historically seen is that only 10-20% of the funding request actually go to the software vendor. Organizations typically add 3-5x additional to either "pad" their request (in the event it doesn't get 'fully funded') and/or this is an opportunity for the university to higher for a bunch of roles they wouldn't have been able to get funded in the first place - so lots of things get buried in these numbers.
Lastly, the figures are also typically multi-year. Like 5-years being asked up front for approval.
Said differently, it wouln't surprise me if the true annual migration cost from onprem to cloud PeopleSoft might only be $10-20M
https://www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/page-assets/...
When you see how badly most academics and academic administrators are at actually running things from a business standpoint it no surprise the academic sector is in such a mess at the moment. Sadly this whole mess is funded by debt handed out that’s not dischargeable in bankruptcy for degrees of highly questionable value. It’s really sad when you follow the money and think about who and how stuff like this is actually paid for.
The whole thing is kept alive by the student loan program. Modify that or take it away and academia in the US would implode.
A bunch of years ago, at college, I built a class management platform for my university. It won me $1k (which was an insane amount of money to college me), and I met with president of the univeristy to pitch him on using it. They were potentially buying Oracle software, and I found myself up against them. At the time, I felt like this professor.
They obviously went with Oracle. I'm sure they spent a ton of money, and I'm sure it was the right choice. I would have gotten bored of it pretty quick. You don't pay Oracle because it's a good deal or a good product... you pay Oracle so you never have to think about it ever again.
I don't really have a point here. I wish there were better options in the market. But I certainly don't want to build them, since it's a boring problem with bad customers (edtech is a horrible sector to sell to). Oracle has a price point that makes it worth it to them, and they have customers willing to pay it.
Hopefully someone sees this blog, and rather than be annoyed at academic/government waste, sees a big market they can dominate with a better product. But given how it was written in 2013, I'm not so sure.
@dang — I found a better link which appears to be a revised version of the current one: https://psc-cuny.org/clarion/2013/may/cunyfirst-users-last/
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This is a post by Prof. David Arnow on the blog of the Brooklyn College’s professors’ union about CUNYfirst, a PeopleSoft-based course registration and HR system sold by Oracle. Posting because the system recently got some attention on Twitter: https://x.com/ChocolateyCrepe/status/1836171439965446441
It seems like there should be 5-6 vendors of 'University HR Software'
You want 1,000 licenses for it? That will be $5,000 a year, for a total of $5 million
It's going to us a year to implement it, we're going to send out 25 people to get it up and running, train your users, etc. That's another $25 million.
We'll spend the next year building integrations to all of your other software and systems, that's going to be another $25 million.
These quotes will all vary +/- 25% depending on the vendor. Schedule a 200 hours of meetings, trainings, etc for 500 people involved with the new software. That's another $5 million.
Where's the other $540 million coming from?
I worked in IT at a CUNY school at the time. Just hilariously poor and unintuitive. Every student was given an Employee ID number. Course registration was basically handled by an e-commerce addon.
If you think about, $600M is enough money that someone somewhere could create an entire new company and staff it with some of the best developers just to get this contract...
Regarding the other bidders dropping out, what exactly was the primary expense that gave it an estimated $1B total cost? $600M can build out a greenfield software platform, so there must be more to it.
Garbage overpriced systems that everyone hates, and which substantially hurt the organization... How do you land those sales? (Joke: "Asking for a friend.")
Some bad ways that big-ticket purchasing decisions are made:
* Committee of people who don't know what they're doing, and/or who can't coordinate to arrive at a good holistic decision/solution.
* Person who wants this done for good reasons, but doesn't know what they're doing.
* Person who wants this as an accomplishment credited to them, but doesn't know what they're doing.
* Person who is mainly thinking "nobody ever got fired for buying [old big-name vendor]", and everything else is secondary.
* Person who is bribed by vendor (e.g., immediate cash, quasi dates with attractive salesperson, career rotating door with vendor).
Other ways?
(I haven't directly seen the bribery way, though heard of it in news stories. I've definitely seen all the other bad ways happen.)
A $600M Anti-Chesterton Fence that nobody knows why it’s there and everyone’s scared to touch.
In government procurement positions, I would be in favor of giving a small %-ge (to the tune of a few hundred thousands of dollars) of money saved from budget to the people in charge of procurement.
The California State University system contracted with PeopleSoft to consolidate their various non integrated systems back in 2003. Initial costs were supposed to be 350 million, but instead ballooned to over 700 million. We still don't use the full functionality of the suite, even though it's all been payed for.
Full report here: https://information.auditor.ca.gov/pdfs/sr2004/2002-110.pdf
So I have an idea...
Why not let the computer science students take a crack at building some of those systems? Maybe not the an HR system, but why not a course registration system? Maybe not for the whole university, but maybe for just the computer science department?
The university would get work for free and the students would get real-world practice with building production code.
I get that there would be risk, but if it was under the supervision of professors (who hopefully are good at building, not just lecturing theory), I think there is an opportunity there.
I'm generally a Hanlon’s razor advocate. Never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence.
With that said this example strains even my ability to justify the incompetence angle.
>Oracle-PeopleSoft did not drop out. However they warned CUNY that for that level of funding, they could not, would not CUSTOMIZE: they would only CONFIGURE
In this case, I don't think Oracle is to blame.
They explicitly warned about the 'limitation,' yet the project proceeded nonetheless.
In my opinion, for this project to succeed, it should have been built from scratch. With the $800 million invested, they could have assembled a team of seasoned and junior developers to get it done. Just my two cents.
I find it really hard to justify spending $600M on a system like that? Look, if you had 500 skilled FTEs working on the project for 2 years, at $250K per FTE, that would be a total cost of $250M. Say 50 FTEs for ongoing support at $12.5M/year or $125M for 10 years. So $375M.
But the above numbers are hugely generous. This is not building an ERP from scratch. Do you really think it would take 500 people (say 400 engineers and 100 non-engineers), to build and deploy such a system? I would imagine you could get it done (and done right) with half that many, or less.
Anyway, just mind-blowing.
Pro Tip: If they're willing to sell it, you don't want it.
Drexel University nearly bankrupted itself in the 80s, among other things, by hiring Lockheed (then Martin Marietta) for a similar boondoggle project. The project was an unmitigated disaster that never delivered anything, and the university had to pay to exit the contract.
Wow, if I’d known about that contract I’d have bid $500 million. I could hire some folks and get that done.
How else do you expect Larry to afford control over surveillance state?
UOH!
My goodness, the world never changes. Saw the same "new enterprise software much worse than the incumbent, terrible UI/UX, everyone hates it" dynamic play out *30 years ago* with SAP R/3. When I check back in 2054, expect it will not be any different. Technology changes, but people and organizational dynamics largely do not.
As a somewhat related PeopleSoft story, the government of Canada paid IBM and a variety of contractors $3.5B over several years for a PeopleSoft-based payroll system called Phoenix.
The system was a disaster. It never worked properly. So the government is throwing hundreds of millions towards its replacement.
to manage means to extract-value-from and $600M for software is a lot of value extracted.
I'd bet huge that there is a layer of managers who don't see themselves as being accountable for domain competence in anything they manage as that's what the consultants are for. Consultants mean headcount and budget to manage- which is the definition of success in an institution. they run an organiation, the mission is little people IC problems.
It's not broken, it just works for people you can't see.
Does anyone know what "pathways" is and why they wanted so much central control to set that up? It seems that there was some sort of power angle to all this.
Bryan Cantrill's rant about Oracle for those who haven't seen it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2047s
> There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. [...] This company is about one man, his ego, and what he wants to inflict on humanity. That's it.
I have been negative on Oracle since the ‘90s, when I had to work with an installer CD for Oracle software —- an official Oracle CD —- that:
1. Had multiple installer applications on it, with no indication which was “the” installer application. 2. On opening the installer, asked me to select the install file to act on, again with no clear direction. 3. Had “help” files on the disc, in HTML format, which contained broken links to other files on the disc.
At the same time my coworkers, experienced Oracle DBAs and developers, with full paid-for support from Oracle, spent an entire summer trying to install an Oracle development environment, and failed.
All of which to say, yeah — $600 million sounds about right, as long as it turns out the software was never successfully implemented.
Now that's a... difficult company name.
Certainly one of the names of all times.
Was it written in PHP?
Every time something comes up, this is how I explain it to people:
"Why Enterprise Software Sucks" https://x.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776?lang=...
> CUNY Central was so eager to have a centralized MIS tool to use for its own centralizing, corporatizing agenda, that it totally ignored the implications of the Oracle "configure-only" limitation: business processes would have to be made to fit Oracle, not vice versa. Capabilities that we now have will vanish. The staff, the faculty, the students would just have to "adjust" (the technical term being "suck it up").
This is an interesting perspective. From what I've seen / heard from others, it's generally better to adapt processes to the off-the-shelf tool than to try and customize or build from scratch to accommodate your bespoke processes (especially in the business operations realms). For one, the organization is likely less unique than you think, and those bespoke processes are as often a function of some early employee's preference as it is a genuinely good reason. For another, customizing software is not just a one time cost, since every subsequent update / upgrade is likely to require additional work (or at least testing). And finally, in most cases the closer you are to a vanilla, standard process, the more likely you are to stay in compliance with local laws and regulations.
Though I suppose it's possible that the imbalance is just due to the fact that it is much harder to quantify the costs of using a suboptimal (for you) process than it is to look at the procurement contract for a custom solution.