CUNY paid Oracle $600M for its HR software (2013)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Cost and scale of the CUNYfirst deal

  • The oft-cited $600M Oracle figure is heavily disputed in the thread.
  • Several participants with higher-ed/ERP experience argue that a $600M single software deal is implausible relative to CUNY’s total budget and typical higher-ed pricing.
  • Others dig into CUNY budget and tender documents and conclude it looks more like ~$300M total over ~10 years across ~26 institutions, including HR, ERP, compute, and staff, i.e. ~$30M/year system-wide, with only a fraction going to Oracle itself.
  • Some note that universities and agencies routinely pad multi‑year IT budget requests by 3–5x to cover staffing, risk, and under‑funding, which can make quoted numbers look inflated or opaque.

Enterprise / government procurement dynamics

  • Many comments describe large organizations (academia, government, Fortune 50) as structurally prone to waste, dysfunction, and “no one gets fired for buying big-name vendor” thinking.
  • Incentive problems are emphasized: people spending others’ money, resume-padding, budget-protection, “lowest bidder” rules, and occasional hints of corruption or “incentives.”
  • Vendors like Oracle, Deloitte, IBM, etc., are framed as specialists at extracting money from such environments.

Oracle / PeopleSoft and software quality

  • Multiple anecdotes depict Oracle/PeopleSoft systems as archaic, unintuitive, and painful to implement and use, sometimes never working properly despite huge spend.
  • CUNYfirst is described as visually and functionally obsolete and process-worsening, with “configure only” constraints forcing CUNY to change course numbering and workflows to fit the software.

Build vs buy vs open source

  • Several argue that the same money could have funded a greenfield system or an in‑house/contractor build with far fewer people and better UX.
  • Others counter that selling into higher-ed is so painful and “boring” that only vendors like Oracle tolerate it, and sustaining custom systems is non‑trivial.
  • There is recurring support for government‑funded open source platforms that many institutions could share, but skepticism about political feasibility and governance.

Process change vs customization

  • One camp insists organizations should adapt processes to standard ERP workflows to avoid endless costly customization.
  • Another camp reports repeated failure and poor UX when shoehorning unique or complex processes (universities, healthcare, payroll) into rigid off‑the‑shelf systems.
  • Consensus: customizing ERPs is risky and expensive, but blindly forcing all processes to fit the tool can also be disastrous.

Broader critiques of academia and bureaucracy

  • Several participants generalize from CUNY: entrenched inefficiency, weak accountability, difficulty firing underperformers, and bloated internal IT or consulting layers.
  • Others push back that similar or worse dysfunction exists in large private companies; incompetence and misaligned incentives are seen as systemic rather than sector‑specific.