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>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

>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 CASE where these clowns were involved in a government project and it didn't turn out to be an expensive, over-budget, delayed, shitshow leaving the taxpayers holding the bag. Like for example Austria has a national highway company(ASFINAG) and national railway company(OEBB) where the government is majority shareholder and they work pretty damn good to serve the taxpayers and the users of those services whether they're Austrians or not. So then why not have the same for IT infrastructure instead of outsourcing it to all these parasites? It's 2025, when do we start treating IT infrastructure like road, rail, water, energy, healthcare etc already? How many decades more need to pass till the government realizes that the internet and associated services are also worthy of national importance and therefore ownership? I'm not saying to nationalize the internet, on the contrary privatization and decentralization is better for consumers, but the digital interaction between taxpayer and government is something that should not be outsourced to the private sector, especially not to foreign publicly treaded companies like Atos, who have no skin in the local game and don't give a fuck if they leave an expensive mess behind as long as they can ride the gravy train while it lasts. So excuse me if I have a high degree of skepticism when I hear about the involvement of the likes of Atos in taxpayer funded projects.

protocolture 1y ago
>So then why not have the same for IT infrastructure instead of outsourcing it to all these parasites? Not a comment on Atos directly, but I am betting that its an opex/capex thing. Government departments see ongoing maintenance as internal, opex driven activity and right size their infrastructure teams to handle the ongoing workload. Government departments see a large implementation project as an opportunity to save money through capex. Rather than increasing their resourcing internally to complete the project, they send it to tender. The tender document will require that the vendor hand over to their internal team for ongoing maintenance and support at the completion of the project. No ongoing impact to department opex budgets or headcounts. Even if it blows out by like 50%, they probably still save money by not managing the labor costs internally. And they can force the vendor to take a hit on some overruns.
tsimionescu 1y ago
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.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  You think governments should have a full integration team full time for potential software deployments of bought on the shelf solution? That doesn’t make much sense. Governments don’t have that much software integration to do. Especially when you consider that these projects generally require specific knowledge of what’s integrated. What will these people do the rest of the time? Are you suggesting hiring specialists of every piece of software the government is likely to use full time? I mean when faced with something you completely fail to understand there are two solutions: it’s all a scam or you are missing something fundamental. Here I think a lot of people are completely misunderstanding what integration is about. Consider that these are not IT issues which push all these departments to ask for different feature sets and customisations leading to every integration being different and these are not problems programmers will solve. Consider also what happens if projects fail. With an integrator, you sue them or breach with penalties and move on to a competitor. No harm, no foul. If it’s internal, you have a full on restructuration on your hand for something that is not even your core responsibility. Anyway, I would like to see the face of some you when you learn that it’s highly likely that’s the people managing the integrators from the customer side were probably mostly consultants for a big consulting firm because that’s another thing government agencies don’t know how to do.
  - lou1306 1y ago
    > Governments don’t have that much software integration to do ...What? Most European governments rely on herds and herds of pachidermic, segregated software systems and databases. There's surely enough to keep a whole team busy for years, if not decades. And I'd be surprised if the final costs would be higher than hiring consultants again and again.
mk89 1y ago
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 knowledge in the business.
- jack_tripper 1y ago
  >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 about a Nextcloud instance here, not building an entire hyperscaler from scratch, like AWS or Equinix, which is indeed a skill next to inexistent in most of Europe, which does indeed require contracting FAANG corps to build because we lack that capability in Europe.
  - mk89 1y ago
    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.
    - franga2000 1y ago
      But this is the exact issue you have with IT outsourcing - instead of taking the obvious and sustainable solution, there's a clause somewhere in the 500 page requirements doc that doesn't even make any sense, but means you have to use something nonstandard and even add some of your own hacks on top. Because it's a tender, you can't really change the spec and you don't care to either, because a terrible bodge means they have to go back to you whenever it needs changes/fixes. An in-house development department on the other hand doesn't have to stick to the strictly disconnected way of tenders and the development team can actually work with the stakeholders to develop and evolve the spec throughout the project. They also don't need to guarantee future business for themselves through vendor lock-in or boost their corporate partners through technology choices. This is an unprecedented case where a private company decided to go the open source route for a government project, usually it's only the in-house teams that pick open source.
bluGill 1y ago
> 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.
woodson 1y ago
> So then why not have the same for IT infrastructure instead of outsourcing it to all these parasites? That exists already (and has for a long while): the Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ, https://www.brz.gv.at/en/ 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. The question is, why haven’t they been tasked with this migration?

protocolture 1y ago

>So then why not have the same for IT infrastructure instead of outsourcing it to all these parasites? Not a comment on Atos directly, but I am betting that its an opex/capex thing. Government departments see ongoing maintenance as internal, opex driven activity and right size their infrastructure teams to handle the ongoing workload. Government departments see a large implementation project as an opportunity to save money through capex. Rather than increasing their resourcing internally to complete the project, they send it to tender. The tender document will require that the vendor hand over to their internal team for ongoing maintenance and support at the completion of the project. No ongoing impact to department opex budgets or headcounts. Even if it blows out by like 50%, they probably still save money by not managing the labor costs internally. And they can force the vendor to take a hit on some overruns.

tsimionescu 1y ago

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.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago
You think governments should have a full integration team full time for potential software deployments of bought on the shelf solution? That doesn’t make much sense. Governments don’t have that much software integration to do. Especially when you consider that these projects generally require specific knowledge of what’s integrated. What will these people do the rest of the time? Are you suggesting hiring specialists of every piece of software the government is likely to use full time? I mean when faced with something you completely fail to understand there are two solutions: it’s all a scam or you are missing something fundamental. Here I think a lot of people are completely misunderstanding what integration is about. Consider that these are not IT issues which push all these departments to ask for different feature sets and customisations leading to every integration being different and these are not problems programmers will solve. Consider also what happens if projects fail. With an integrator, you sue them or breach with penalties and move on to a competitor. No harm, no foul. If it’s internal, you have a full on restructuration on your hand for something that is not even your core responsibility. Anyway, I would like to see the face of some you when you learn that it’s highly likely that’s the people managing the integrators from the customer side were probably mostly consultants for a big consulting firm because that’s another thing government agencies don’t know how to do.
- lou1306 1y ago
  > Governments don’t have that much software integration to do ...What? Most European governments rely on herds and herds of pachidermic, segregated software systems and databases. There's surely enough to keep a whole team busy for years, if not decades. And I'd be surprised if the final costs would be higher than hiring consultants again and again.

mk89 1y ago

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 knowledge in the business.

jack_tripper 1y ago
>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 about a Nextcloud instance here, not building an entire hyperscaler from scratch, like AWS or Equinix, which is indeed a skill next to inexistent in most of Europe, which does indeed require contracting FAANG corps to build because we lack that capability in Europe.
- mk89 1y ago
  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.
  - franga2000 1y ago
    But this is the exact issue you have with IT outsourcing - instead of taking the obvious and sustainable solution, there's a clause somewhere in the 500 page requirements doc that doesn't even make any sense, but means you have to use something nonstandard and even add some of your own hacks on top. Because it's a tender, you can't really change the spec and you don't care to either, because a terrible bodge means they have to go back to you whenever it needs changes/fixes. An in-house development department on the other hand doesn't have to stick to the strictly disconnected way of tenders and the development team can actually work with the stakeholders to develop and evolve the spec throughout the project. They also don't need to guarantee future business for themselves through vendor lock-in or boost their corporate partners through technology choices. This is an unprecedented case where a private company decided to go the open source route for a government project, usually it's only the in-house teams that pick open source.

bluGill 1y ago

> 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.

woodson 1y ago

> So then why not have the same for IT infrastructure instead of outsourcing it to all these parasites? That exists already (and has for a long while): the Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ, https://www.brz.gv.at/en/ 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. The question is, why haven’t they been tasked with this migration?