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Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

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Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#31

Post by jack_tripper »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #24
tsimionescu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. It's absurd that in a world where every government interaction isoving online, we still ask every individual state institution to contract out the development and maintenance work to outside companies, instead of having a government IT provider. The savings on bureaucracy and time spent analyzing puvlic offers alone would be immense over a decade.

I think from an efficiency standpoint it makes sense to contract out to bigger players. Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free. The problem of course is that using someone else's proprietary, closed-source code makes you beholden to them. That's a problem for consumers but it's an even bigger problem for sovereign nations. Would be a great out…

>Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free.

If that were true, then all these government IT projects from these infamous consultancies would all come in-time and under budget, but that's never the case, because every government wants things completely different than the other government, so it's never a just a copy-paste, fire-and-forget type of job.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#32

Post by gostsamo »

munchlax wrote: post #5
gostsamo wrote: post #2

Part of a trend, but what made me an impression is that Atos helped in the transition. The old consulting companies would be more than happy to claw back some market share from the US cloud providers.

Of course! Sell the disease and the cure.

Actually, they lost a lot from the clouds providing managed services out of a box. Maybe they got some money from migrations, but this is not where the juice is.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#33

Post by mk89 »

jack_tripper wrote: post #28
mk89 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer Atos + a solid open source solution to "an own IT department that will ditch the battle tested open source solution because XYZ" and then 6 months later bugs rain from the sky with users' data searchable in google. Opening up a whole department requires skills. If you don't have such skills, please hire the "parasite". I prefer that. At least they provide a service, overpaid, ok, but they have at least some…

>overpaid, ok, but they have at least some knowledge in the business. With all due respect, setting up a Nextcloud instance for a government entity is not really rocket science requiring a 150 IQ, Stanford grad, PhD, galaxy-brain labor force, but it's a skill that's easily abundant in Austrian and can be easily transferred to more of the tech labor pool to achieve the same results of what Atos did. We're talking abou…

I am not talking about the Austrian people's skills ;) I bet the employees from Atos were locals, so...

I am talking about politicians that are supposed to create the conditions to set this up in a proper, honest and "good" way. As soon as this becomes a "department", nextcloud is not an option because it lacks xyz.

So let's reimplement it worse. All this to justify the need for having an IT department at all.

This is why sometimes I prefer that they just hire some company and that's it. One and done. (More or less).

Also, on a more disturbing note: how do you reduce the costs, when you have public employees....? You can't fire them, or it's nearly impossible to do so. Atos, on the other hand, you can switch.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#34

Post by [deleted] »

constantcrying wrote: post #6

Good, but this needs to happen on a much larger scale. These are "just" 1200 employees, but throughout Europe there are hundreds of millions of people working with Microsoft services and they all need to be torn out and replaced. >As for the reasoning behind this move, it was prompted by a risk analysis that showed foreign cloud services failed to meet the ministry's privacy requirements, particularly regarding GDPR…

[deleted]

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#35

Post by jack_tripper »

atonse wrote: post #21
tsimionescu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. It's absurd that in a world where every government interaction isoving online, we still ask every individual state institution to contract out the development and maintenance work to outside companies, instead of having a government IT provider. The savings on bureaucracy and time spent analyzing puvlic offers alone would be immense over a decade.

At least in the US we started solving this by having high salaries for tech workers in government (see 18f and USDS, etc, both shut down by Trump), or UK's GDS which was a pioneer in this space. If you want to attract good talent, there are successful models out there now, but you have to start by paying them way more than the average government salary. But the contractors throw lobbying money at these things and try…

I disagree. Unlike the US, tech salaries in Austrian private sector are not terribly amazing to begin with, so the Austrian government would have no issues to find labor within the budget that they gave Atos, not to mention that government workers in Austria have other perks that workers in the private sector don't have, like harder to fire, having their own private kindergartens for the workers' kids, much better pension funds and health insurance funds with more coverage and less waiting times, public housing, etc that to a lot of people will have more value than a higher paycheque in the private sector.

So IT IS technically possible to gather the labor force to build the project in house, it just isn't much political motivation to do so when you have lobbyists swaying leaders in the other direction, and the investigative journalists and voters are too tech illiterate to understand this type of grift because when the government pays a billion Euros for a bridge or a tunnel and after 10 years the bridge or tunnel is not there, everyone notices and someone needs to go to jail or at least loose their job in politics for that obvious theft.

But if you spend a billion to consultancies on a government IT project, and it's an offshored clusterfuck that barely works and could have been done better by a local shop for 1/100 of the cost, then the journalists and taxpayers have no clue they've been robbed blind because nobody understands the nitty gritty and costs of SW development, and unlike bridges and tunnels, the public can't see the source code in the open as they walk to school to see that there's nothing there, which is why government IT projects has now become the best and easiest way to funnel taxpayer money into private pockets.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#37

Post by woodson »

jack_tripper wrote: post #4

Correct title would be "Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos". I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites, like the high quality ones Denmark or UK have, instead of just outsourcing everything government IT related to politically connected publicly traded consultancies like Atos, Kapsch or T-Systems, which just screams of corruption and cronyism, things Austrian…

> I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites

It (kinda) does: the Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ, https://www.brz.gv.at/en/). They do a lot of public facing government websites and portals. If you lived in Austria, there’s a good chance that you’ve used at least one of them.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#38

Post by 1oooqooq »

jack_tripper wrote: post #31
Ajedi32 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think from an efficiency standpoint it makes sense to contract out to bigger players. Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free. The problem of course is that using someone else's proprietary, closed-source code makes you beholden to them. That's a problem for consumers but it's an even bigger problem for sovereign nations. Would be a great out…

>Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free. If that were true, then all these government IT projects from these infamous consultancies would all come in-time and under budget, but that's never the case, because every government wants things completely different than the other government, so it's never a just a copy-paste, fire-and-forget type of…

oh it very much is. they just act and bill like it's not.

corruption requires costs you cannot verify after delivery. for construction it's the exagerated foundation which they only actually deliver what's needed and pocket the difference. for software it is the hundreds of rewrites that may or may not have happened and are now in the past.

Re: Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud

#39

Post by bluGill »

jack_tripper wrote: post #13
embedding-shape wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Correct title would be Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos. From the article: > The implementation was carried out in partnership with Atos Austria, which worked alongside Nextcloud's team to ensure the platform met the ministry's legal, technical, and organizational requirements. So yes, while Atos seems to have been the contractor (?), the end result is that the title is correct, they've replaced whate…

>And I'm guessing more people are likely to have heard about NextCloud before while probably not heard about Atos before, unless you're Austrian You don't need to be Austrian for that. Atos is a pretty infamous IT services provider that operates in all of Europe and has the same issues as all such service providers like Accenture, Cognizant, Capgemini, Wipro, IBM, NTT Data, etc, and so far I haven't see ONE SINGLE CA…

> Like for example Austria has a national highway company(ASFINAG) and national railway company(OEBB)

Since only the government is doing these, there is no real gain from outsourcing - either way you pay the full costs (it need not be that way, but that is how it typically is). For IT lots of others also need that work and so you can share the overhead costs if you outsource.

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