Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MPs demand answers on Fujitsu's inclusion in lucrative frameworks

computerweekly.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–22 of 22 posts

Re: MPs demand answers on Fujitsu's inclusion in lucrative frameworks

#21

Post by graemep »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #14

A little known but amusing fact: Fujitsu (well, ICL, the UK company that was bought by Fujitsu and then became the UK branch of Fujitsu) is still the supplier of Microsoft software to the European institutions through a long-standing framework contract with DIGIT. Why EU could not buy from Microsoft directly to spare the embarrassment is beyond my comprehension.

> Why EU could not buy from Microsoft directly to spare the embarrassment is beyond my comprehension.

Possibly either some form of CYA, or a requirement to buy from an EU company.

Re: MPs demand answers on Fujitsu's inclusion in lucrative frameworks

#22

Post by roryirvine »

KaiserPro wrote: post #2

The problem for the UK is the Fujitsu owns the last vestiges of the UK IT scene. ICT/ICL and a bunch of other were all bought out by them in the early 90s. But also there are two other issues: 1) there aren't many companies that are able to bid on that scale 2) if you remove fujitsu then you're handing it to either crapita or atos. who are also shite. The solution to this is develop decent in-house architecture team…

Part of the answer is dividing programmes up into smaller chunks to attract a wider range of bidders.

The problem is that, even when divided up, they're still often "build and run" contracts which are less attractive to the smaller consultancies which tend to specialise in the "build" part, and are much less keen on the "run" aspect (with good reason, as it tends to be low-margin and painful).

And even then, fashions inevitably change and suddenly someone starts wondering why they've got 30 different tech vendors and need an expensive enterprise architecture team to glue their work together. Cue "why can't we just consolidate all this and get AtoS to do the whole thing?", and the cycle begins again...

Post reply on HN