Comment by alberth

These kinds of mysteries usually have a frustrating and mundane answer. The people with the power to make the decision:

- were incompetent and just went with a big name, or

- made the decision due to salespeople (social pressure and/or gifts), or

- had interests that did not align with the org (ex. resume padding)

But who knows, maybe there's a good reason they went with Oracle.

We don't know the true scope of this, but apparently $600m was low balling in this story:

>The negotiations that were the run-up to the purchase of CUNYFirst were a travesty. The project required an expenditure of up to a billion dollars to do it right. CUNY Central offered far less. All but one of the bidders dropped out as a result: the project could not be done properly with what CUNY offered. 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.

I do agree that it sounds like this was some 10+ year project with heaps of support. If this account it true, they went with Oracle because they were the cheapest (and were fine with the compromise of no configuration to hit that goal).

If that hunch is true, I can see some $600k-$1m/year average for support of an entire chain of universities (remember that CUNY is a systetem of 10 colleges and more CC's like a UC, not just one campus) being peanuts that no one wanted to touch.

Seems they got what they paid for:

>The actual cost far exceeds the $600 million dollars that go to Oracle. Because processes are now much more inefficient, more people have to be hired to do tasks that were formerly automated.

> - The interface is laughable: It looks like an early-90s update of 3270 bi-synch technology. Web 2.0? Ha. Not even Web 1.0.

> - Because CUNY wouldn't pay for customization, we had to renumber our courses. This is just one of many, less visible to faculty, changes that CUNYFirst has forced.

absolutely not surprising as someone who's used Peoplesoft. That stuff felt ancient even in 2003. to sign onto that 10 years afterwards for a very stagnant software is just insanity.

-----

now of course I'm taking this at face value. It could be exaggerated or from a biased source. But in my biased opinion, who in the last 15 years isn't biased against Oracle's software? they will probably literally die out as their clients age out of the job market.

I once submitted an RFP response for what was literally a CRUD app for a government agency. Medium-ish (to me) traffic. Needed to be rock-solid. Needed to be developed to spec, hosted, and supported (including tech support) for 5 years. I bid a little over $2million (I personally would have made about $500k of that). After a bit, the RFP was withdrawn and given to a sole-source provider for $100million, with the excuse that it was so complicated (HN would laugh at this if you saw the spec) that only one company could do it. So, that company gets it. Outsources everything to contractors in Pakistan. Site is constantly glitchy. And this next part is not a lie (and was def. not part of the spec) -- it only worked during business hours (m-f, 8am-5pm)! However the users of the site had to do work every day due to legal deadline requirements. They just had to set on the data until the next workday morning. I suspect that the provider spent about $1million or less for the entire contract and just kept the rest. So that is how govt. contracts can go.

With government bureaucrats with no penalty for failure and no expertise in software development guiding the design? And “lowest bidder” contractors to implement whatever shitty design the bureaucrats came up with?

Hahaha recipe for failure.

Well, San Francisco tried that for $40m and all they ended up with is a system that doesn't work and an Indian contractor that they made rich.

I've seen this happen before with big companies - they don't have $100k to pay for software which would save them $5M / year.

Why? They'd signed a contract with SAP who'd sucked up their entire budget.

Not quite true, especially not for the higher end research universities.

The University of Washington is projected to spend $2B on modernizing IT infrastructure (which does seem like a reasonable amount).

In that number though is $340M to update it's accounting system. Not quite directly comparable to $600M for HR, but not completely perpendicular either

Plus one on this. I've almost never seen a 9 figure deal in my life, and the only ones I've seen are massive core infra level deals by mega-corps. I absolutely cannot imagine CUNY spending more than most F50s spend on HRMs.

Edit:

I did some digging into the Tender [0] and it looks like it was $300M total across all 25 universities and colleges in the CUNY system along with the CUNY administrative portion itself and it was a full bundle of HRM, ERP, On-Prem Compute Resources, and headcount (PS and internal) over a 10 year period, so $30M per year across all 26 institutions.

This came out to around $1.25M ACV per organization (10 year contract, 26 organizations).

In reality, some of the larger colleges (eg. CCNY) will have spent much more than the smaller ones (eg. Bronx CC).

In addition, each of the large CUNY colleges had budgets in the $150M range in the early 2010s [1] along with a separate $2B budget for CUNY's central organization (as mentioned above)

What seems to have happened is the above page treated overall TCV as part of a single budget, when in reality, each individual constituent org with it's own budget spent out of their own pocket for ERP, HRM, Headcounr (PS and internal), and Compute (on-prem)

This isn't egregious for the size of organizations that each of the constituent colleges and CCs in CUNY are.

The big question is, if you used the PSC's (imo flawed) methodology, what would it give for CSUs, UCs, and SUNY (all of whom have a similar structure and student size). I'd expect a similar amount.

[0] - https://www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/page-assets/...

[1] - https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/finance/upload...

This one for $800 thousand?

https://wwe2.osc.state.ny.us/transparency/contracts/contract...

You ask for 5x the need, get 2x the original amount, and then when the project costs 1.9x as much as expected you're still slightly under budget!

Reminds me of an anecdote about a lead engineer for metro rail projects in India.

The lead engineer has over-designed the infrastructure by 3x over the standard. The junior engineer thought he was incompetent.

Turns out, he's paid the big bucks to add affordances as counterbalance for corners cut due to corruption in every step of the production line.

50% overhead is pretty common for academic institutions. For example, indirect costs for an awarded grant are often 50%+.

And yes, it's ridiculous.

It was also reported by much more reliable sources, and was a statewide project.

This is not a particularly useful contribution.

Source 1: Only mentions anonymous sources. And while I would put partial weight on that coming from an actual journalist, this is the same professor who wrote the original blogpost.

Source 2: Same publication as Source 1, though I don't see a byline. No named sources.

Source 3: No named sources. The "About Us" features Lorem Ipsum and four photos of the same woman.

Source 4: A reddit post, no sources, and the amount quoted is not $600 million, but $250 million.

Source 5: A petition. References an Oracle press release that didn't show up in your Google search (most likely because it doesn't exist, or it would be widely cited).