NEWS Microsoft is in talks with the UK's National Health Service (NHS) for a "tailored" version of its Windows operating system and Office desktop suite in a deal that could have huge implications for the way it sells to its largest customers - but the company denies it will sell a 'stripped down' cheaper version.
Richard Granger, the NHS IT director general, is due to meet with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today to discuss a deal worth several hundred million pounds, according to a report in The Times.
Granger has previously and very publicly stated his demand for much bigger discounts on Microsoft software based on the NHS' bulk purchasing power of over half a million licences. He even launched trials of Linux software at the end of last year in what many saw as an attempt to force the Redmond giant's hand, and a meeting with Bill Gates last month now appears to have been successful.
Granger told the paper: "They [Microsoft] are talking about making specific products for the health sector...taking Office and converting it into a look and feel that would be appropriate for clinicians. It will be the first of its kind...a generic platform specified for use by medical professionals."
Richard Holway, industry analyst at Ovum Holway, said the implications of the agreement are "huge".
"It could open the floodgates for other organisations – public and private sector alike – to also want their own "tailored" versions. Perhaps, at long last, the stranglehold of Microsoft licensing pricing might be broken," he said.
Holway described Granger as "the toughest of procurement officers" and said he may have already saved taxpayers over £1bn through forcing suppliers to the £5bn NHS IT programme to drop their prices.
A Microsoft spokesman told silicon.com that the tailored version it is in discussions with the NHS over includes all core components of the operating system and desktop suite.
A statement issued by the company said: "We cannot comment on specific negotiations with government customers, but we are keen to ensure that all of our licensing agreements represent value for money for government, including the NHS. Microsoft is committed to ensuring that we respond to the differing requirements of our customers and partners, and we always look at how best we can help them gain value from their investment."
A spokesman from the National Programme for IT would not comment on the specifics of the discussions and said the NHS is keeping its options open.
"The National Programme is meeting with Steve Ballmer of Microsoft as a supplier of IT services and products to the NHS; but these discussions are not exclusive to Microsoft," he said. "The National Programme is in negotiations with other suppliers designed to identify the best value IT products and services for the future of the NHS, that take into account the unique size and scale of the NHS as an IT marketplace."
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1. Colin Stamp
A personalised version of a proprietry OS? Like THAT is going to be cheaper to support & upgrade in the future. I don't think so! Once the ink is dry on the contract, MS can demand huge payments for patches, fixes and upgrades, because they have to be "one-off" tailored to the new "stripped" version, and you "cannot use the mainstream code versions". The BPs and VARs will all have zero experience of the stripped version, and the NHS will have dug itself into a huge pit of closed proprietry s/w. Save a penny now, spend a pound later... oh dear!
2. Phil Royse
I think the NPfIT may have misunderstood how many clinicians use MS Office for clinical-type activity. It is quite a small number, perhaps in the low thousands?
Although hundreds of thousands of NHS employees use MS Office, they use them in a general way, just like everybody else does. This because most of the users are not actually clinicians, they are managers, pen pushers, bureaucrats, clerks etc.
I cannot see any benefit anyway in "clinician-special" version of Office???
3. anonymous
This is a smokescreen. (Even the NHS and Microsoft could not be so IT-dumb as to think this is really a good idea. Well, MS couldn't. Well, whatever.)
This derives from MS' attempt to keep up the facade of a one-world price, while doing the typical monopoly thing of price-segmentation - selling to each of a series of customers for as much as they can get.
So when the Kingdom of Thailand obliged MS ("do not lose any sale to Linux" memo hot in their pockets) to migrate the price of XP + Office closer to the incremental cost of production - and offer the combination for IIRC $36 - MS later felt the need to invent a separate "special" version of XP and Office for Thailand.
And here we have the same thing.
Was not one of the W/MSO selling points to the NHS that we cold take advantage of the software being that which everyone used in school and at other work, thus beneiftting from their trianing and not having to train specially? That was largely rubbish, in practice, but the argument suddenly explodes and dissipates in a puff of vapour - the latest notional vapourware.
Not a problem here, this practice runs Open Office, and it works fine on NT4 and the Linux that replaces is for things other than our actual clinical system - for which we await the completion of an OSS alternative. Eagerly.
4. Alan Campbell
More customisation, more variants, more bugs, more security holes, more support, and therefore a much greater true cost.
Sir Bill is no philanthropist, and you can be quite sure that he will extract his pound of flesh one way or another. If costs go down to big customers like the NHS, they will go up for small fry like you and me. UK givernment software procurement always ends in disaster, this one will be no exception. It will be bug-ridden and unstable, insecure (which will certainly result in exposure of patient data, and subsequent prosecution, no doubt of the wrong person), late (like ALL M$ projects from day 1), and, like M$ Office, will be generally inefficient and messy to use.
For less tham what the Convicted Monopolist will charge, the NHS could get a whole team of competent people (programmers, testers, analysts, even simply thinkers, who create original ideas but don't necessarily do coding...) to build and support an optimised open-source solution. Even better, they could share the work and rewards with other countries, including the very poorest, and still save money.
The Exeter GP has the right basic idea IMHO. There are good pieces of OSS available now, which could form the basis of whatever else he requires. A secure database for patient records should not be difficult. The things I see on screen at my GP's (using Windows on the desktop and a server which I think is NT) could easily be replicated by a competent team, it is after all only a searchable database with connections to the appointments database so the correct patient's history comes up automatically. I expect that MYSQL could do all that, with a nice front end, which could be implemented in many ways.
I hope that the medical area is the next place that open source makes progress, it is badly needed.