[sclug] Council to pay 17m for computer upgrade

[Tom Carbert-Allen]

On 20/03/2010 6:41, Mike Mallett wrote:
> This seems to have started some debate in Reading ....
>
> http://www.getreading.co.uk/news/s/2067467_council_to_pay_17m_for_computer_upgrade
>
>    
when I saw 17m I was rather shocked, but turns out that is just so they 
don't have dot in there URL and it's actually 1.7m which is about the 
going rate for that sort of project. If you take a ball park one third 
each for hardware, licensing and labour then the hardware cost looks 
fine. Although this did just drop in my inbox last week

*10 x PALLET BASE UNIT DEAL*

315 x HP DC5700 Core 2 Duo 1.86Ghz - 1GB Ram / 80GB HDD With DVD/CDRW

400 x HP DC7600 P4 3.4Ghz - 1GB Ram  / 80GB HDD With DVD/CDRW

All with WinXP pro COA
*68,250 GBP TAKE ALL  (works out ~?95 per machine)

For me the issue is with the third for licensing and the third for 
labour. From my limited experience of council IT, there are probably 
complete morons on ?500 a day on that project who put a CD in and press 
next, next, next, finish and management on 100k who just turn up in a 
shiny suit shake some hands and get paperwork signed (which someone else 
has written and they don't even understand) now this all sounds 
perfectly normal to us in IT but look at how much they pay the people 
who do the real important stuff like teachers etc. I have personally 
worked on IT projects with a council where there were plenty of these 
types who even admitted freely to not understanding even the basics of 
the technology of the project but had very firm hand shakes and were 
very happy with there salary thankyou very much.

The licensing is also a waste of time, what real added value are they 
going to get moving away from windows 2000? it is still a perfectly 
useable OS which can run the latest applications (on 128mb ram too). The 
article makes it very clear that w2k is working fine for them and they 
are forced to move because of MS support policy not because they need 
it. Even if the licencing is discounted, the whole migration project 
will cost them loads in consultancy with very little visible benefits on 
a technology level (ok the security model may have improved some but as 
the source is closed and patch's only come out when MS feels like it, i 
would say it is just as much of a risk)

TCA
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