NHS loses massive Microsoft licensing rebate Software licensing in the National Health Service is about to get a lot more complicated, and a lot more expensive. Back in 2004 the Office of Government Commerce signed a massive deal with Microsoft to provide all desktop software within the NHS. This followed some very high-level lobbying from both Bill Gates and Steve …
Not working in the NHS I'm guessing here... I'd be pretty sure that it's not as easy as switching to OpenOffice. I bet there is a fair whack of software which runs on Windows but totally unrelated to MS Office, and then maybe some other software which is tied into MS Office.
I do wonder though if they should have made the switch, maybe it's about time to seriously consider making the switch so they aren't tied into Microsoft solutions (which could well give Microsoft the upper hand to charge what they want in future).
I wouldn't be surprised though if they come up with a new agreement, maybe Microsoft will 'discount' the software my a couple of million just to lock the NHS in for another few years.
Rob
Its not quite clear in the article who actually pulled the plug on the deal? Did Microsoft pull out of the deal or was this an action on the part of the NHS?
The comment from the Microsoft spokesman seems to hint that Microsoft pulled the plug due to the money they were losing, but the NHS spokesman seems to be implying that the decision was there's in order to pass the decision back to the local Trusts.
Can you clarify this for us John? Or are both sides keeping quiet on the specifics?
Seems like a reasonable assumption that MS were sick of getting so little cash and tried to up the price somewhat, and the NHS thought the new price was too steep. Negotiations ensued, but the two sides couldn't reach a figure they both agreed on. Now they're both waiting it out and hoping the other side blinks first.
Isn't this what we were saying at the time, that it was just a means to draw the NHS in to make it ever harder for them to move to an alternative solution? Time to bite the bullet, Mr Lansley, and ditch MS for a cheaper alternative. Yes, it will hurt short-term, but the savings will come over the following years.
Plus we'd see less headlines about various bits of the NHS being brought down by a virus or leaking data via a compromised machine (can't do much about the CD on the train though).
"(can't do much about the CD on the train though)."
Yes, you can. Repeated and brutal beatings for offenders until anyone given a cd full of data breaks down in tears at the potential consequences.
Also, a law change that gives people who have had their data lost the opportunity to give the loser a free punt to the nuts (or female equivalent)
"Yes, it will hurt short-term, but the savings will come over the following years"
We don't have spare cash in the system at the moment. And it won't be cheap to make the transition.
Swap a haulage company from MS to open source. Worst that happens is some loads don't get delivered. Move a GP surgery to open source without a cast-iron plan and ......
This is insane. I have worked in the NHS for 10 years. The only MS software we ever use is Word and Powerpoint. All diagnostic imaging and test results are accessed via a web browser interface, or by logging into a remote UNIX system with a terminal emulator.
On top of that, the computers we have to use are fitted with the bare minimum RAM, so even opening a browser window causes frantic HD chugging and a 3 minute wait.
I pray for the day we can all move to Ubuntu & Open Office, I really do.
...MS Exchange. Remember the fiasco over nhs.net? A huge amount of money spent on a customised web mail solution, and finally all thrown away when Exchange was bought in instead.
NHS mail is so crap that I use it as little as possible, and instead give people an off-NHS address. I use Squirrelmail/sendmail/Centos for my own webmail. Yes, it's very amateurish, but I think I prefer it to the vastly over-bloated NHS mail.
AC,@15 July 2010 12.42 GMT,
Do you still know any Bean Counters in the NHS?
If so , advise them on Linux/Ubuntu , and that millions can be saved .
They are good at counting beans but the poor sods are obviously not clued up about computers.
It will take some time to get them to understand about Open Source and freedom to innovate (really innovate and not copy).
"The bottom line is that the NHS uses £270m of Microsoft software and pays less than £65m per year for it."
PR-speak for "The NHS is paying nearly the full retail price for Microsoft software spread over software lifecycles but managed to sell it to the last government as a good deal, now they're wanting the same level of deals we give to large commercial companies and we're refusing to play ball."
Probably get a better deal by going down PC World.
AC because I think my paymasters would be a bit annoyed at that.
And this is why the NHS should have booted MS off its desktops years ago. They could have saved millions and millions of £ by switching to linux and investing in good in house support teams. Typical management fail: "oh no we're unfamiliar with that ZOMGWTFBBQ!!!, We'll just continue to waste public money of substandard software". Same reason that most of the NHS' computers are still running IE6, total lack of leadership and an unwillingness to do what is right.
... continue to post when you can't even understand that enterpise desktops are more than office and windows. Sure it may be possible to migrate everything, but stop pretending it would be either cheap or easy (or all open source).
I'm sorry sir, I'd love to look at your CT scan, but unfortunately a penguin replaced my computer and now I can't view them anymore ...
The smart move is to actually take control of your own infrastructure, not to let some vendor dictate what you use and how much tax they will be extracting from you for the privilege of using it, all while you don't have any option of walking away from their little "deal".
The "tossers" (and not just in the public sector - there are big corporate competitors of Microsoft who actually rely on Microsoft to run their infrastructure, believe it or not) are the ones who fail to do their job of actually planning, administering and *controlling* the infrastructure that keeps critical assets of society running.
Microsoft isn't a department in the UK public sector. It shouldn't be collecting what is effectively a tax from UK citizens and calling the shots over UK infrastructure. That's what you have when some corrupt civil servants delegate all their responsibilities to Microsoft (while presumably getting paid a fat salary, even before any kickbacks are added on).
"The bottom line is that the NHS uses £270m of Microsoft software and pays less than £65m per year for it. For the next three years the cost would have risen to £85m as the NHS deploys more and more technology while the National Programme rolls out."
Or taken out of this spin...
The NHS uses £270m of (overpriced) Microsoft software and has paid £65m per year for it for the last 6 years. The bean counters have just figured out the maths in this and would like to stop paying.
Yes, it's a product formally from Sun, now from Oracle. I believe it used to be GNU/Linux based but it's now based on Oracle. I believe it incorporates a Gnome desktop (configured to work pretty much like Windows), StarOffice, Mozilla Firefox, Evolution (which looks similar to Outlook), and Java.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Desktop_System
Rob
The best (and probably only good) thing about the new government is that they are seriously considering a move top Linux/opensource.
Yes you will need retraining, yes software will need to be re-written . - all possible and will save OUR money in the long run - and will stop funding a hideous American company with MY tax dollars ...
The main issue with an Monopoly is vendor lock in ......... If they didn't have a monopoly in the first place the NHS may have been more sensible,,
Do the NHS need the latest version of Microsoft desktop software ??? (are they playing games ?)
One final thing is that a move to Linux may save lives due to the lack of downtime in systems and will stop hospitals being grounded by some windows virus (aids)
i.e:-
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/18/conficker_nhs/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/18/london_hospital_malware_shutdown/
On one hand you have the savings of a massive discount covering the whole of the NHS (or just NHS England and Wales?)
However that would in effect be a block on the subdivisions within the NHS investigating other software "solutions" which could be more cost effective. At least this way there is a chance of some competition between suppliers reducing costs.
perhaps the costs of MS licensing within the NHS will increase as a PCT or Hospital trust or the DoH doesn't get quite the same discounting but I can't see the licencing coming down to per-GP practice.
I'd rather blame the anonymous spokesperson - however, a report published 7 years ago compared the usability of SUSE 8.2 (on a day that 11.3 is due to be released), with XP, news item here
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/83708/Study_Linux_nears_Windows_XP_usability
demonstrating near equivalence. The actual report is still available from the link
So, perhaps a better question to ask spokesperson/reluctant staff, which treatment or drug do you want to sacrifice in order to keep using Microsoft?
And will you be the one prepared to explain your decision to your client group/patient/stakeholder whichever word works for you and your breakout group?
I’ve worked for the NHS for a year and also know someone high up who was in the negotiations. The deal doesn’t just include office, includes things like (or substantial savings) licenses for Sharepoint, SQL Server, Visual Studio, VB etc and all the Windows boxes they’ve got. Also with this deal you get office just for £9 if you are an employee for home use.
If you think that the biggest employer in Britain doesn’t get a good deal for 60m a year with 1.5m or so employees you are wrong. I saw what happened when they were using a cheap Web version for email (the biggest sh*te ever used, had to copy my email while typing it in case I lost it) and thanks god they moved to Web Outlook or Outlook. NHS should stick with the current version of Office if necessary, why move? What they need is to re-negotiate the server software and that may worth less than 60m if they know what they are talking about.
This is a superb illustration of why you adopt multi platform, well documented/specificfied solutions; use standard file formats and protocols of which there are several implementations. When your current provider hikes the price you can threaten to walk - and they know that you can do it.
What a surprise that MS wants more money; they priced low to get the NHS enmeshed and raise the price when the know that they cannot move away quickly.
This is more about Open Standards than Open Source -- although Open Source fits the bill admirably.
While there may be some critical Windows-only software that is a problem, most of the desktop and office stuff need not be MS at al;. As they no doubt have lots of XP licenses, why not LINUX for most and run a VM for a few?
And less of the brought-down-by-virus headlines as well.
Of course its a pain to change, a major one, but we are talking about hundreds of millions of pounds here. And going from XP to 7 is also a pain and re-training exercise for most non-el-reg readers.
Anyone fancy forming a company to offer that change-over assistance?
It's not "some" Windows-only software that's the problem. Look around a GP surgery, and you'll see almost no-one using office software. A couple of secretaries writing letters, and that's it.
Apart from email. Fixable, but there's a lot of time invested in learning Outlook. nhs.net is also Exchange-based, and would have to be essentially trashed. Not a major problem; it's not fantastically useful anyway.
Browsing is not an issue. I recently started using FF on the only important (to me) NHS site, which I had previously thought required IE6. No problem.
The real killers are the surgery back-end systems. Half-a-dozen different companies (more? 10 or 12?) produce surgery systems, all running on Windows, all mission-critical, and running all day long. One important one is still *DOS*-based. No-one in their right mind would try to virtualise these - it's just too risky. Here's your real problem - convince these companies to port to Linux, and you're done. In surgeries, anyway.
Forget Internet Explorer and browsers, that's the easy bit.
Almost every single application is developed to run on MS Windows. FACT. Companies, governments, charities, etc all run MS Windows as it is the ONLY way they can run the applications they need.
Yes, yes, there are people out there developing for Mac, Linux, Amiga, NeXT, ZOS, etc, but those are NICHE markets and home developers.
Until the world stops using MS Windows on 90% of the machines the situation won't change.
And as a taxpayer and shareholder, I'm not happy risking the money required to pay for the redevelopment of all the applications my company uses throughout the business. Moderate sized business with 500 apps in the portfolio.
I'm not defending the MS position - just pointing out fact.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2010/06/16/june-2010-web-server-survey.html
70% of active webservers run a *nix of some sort only 18% are M$ not exactly a niche market or home developers, also the list of major companies and government orgs that are switching to linux is ever growing.
The only reason Companies, Governmenst and charities run M$ is because tools like you tell them linux can't run the software they need which is downright bollocks. There are some specialist apps that might need windows but most of them can be run via VM and most companies just need a word processor, email and spreadsheet all of them run perfectly and more securely than on windoze. So take your so called facts and shove them where the sun don't shine
These days, it's really pretty simple to write your application to be independent of the end-user's operating system, particularly when the local machine is just used as an interface to a networked, server-based system.
And if you think modern Linux development is just home-based, you really ought to get out more.
I work in an NHS hospital trust. We have a web-based patient records system which could be de-customised away from IE without changing the look-and-feel.
Very few staff have a strong grasp of MS Office in the first place, so moving them to Sun Office or OOo is not going to catastrophically harm their productivity.
My one concern is that migrating away from Outlook is likely to harm productivity as it's the one MS Office application people here use to more than basic level.
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