Comment by etempleton

Comment by etempleton 2 days ago

I cannot imagine any college paying 600 million for such a thing. I suspect the writer is very much mistaken on the price and a bit paranoid on the College's motives. Perhaps it is 600 million over 10+ years.

Why they would ever go with Oracle is another mystery as there are a number of vendors who specialize in this type of software for colleges (some of it good, most of it bad), so it would be foolish to explore a solution from Oracle that needs such a high level of customization to fit the needs of a University.

Vegenoid 2 days ago

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.

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etempleton 2 days ago

You are likely correct. My best guess is they hired someone in IT from outside of higher education that had extensive experience with Oracle and had deployed it successfully in the past and so it was always going to be Oracle even though it was a poor fit.

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johnnyanmac 2 days ago

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.

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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.

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