Scotland's national database deal

Although it's not the normal focus of my blog I couldn't resist mentioning the recent deal that Procurement Scotland had struck with Oracle - The Register has a few more details. Essentially, for a fee of £18.7m around 80 public bodies in Scotland will have unlimited access to a range of Oracle technology. Now £18.7 million is a reasonable size of technology deal but it's by no means enormous.

What is more striking, though, is the signal that gives. Countries can use their aggregate purchasing power, in the same way that large corporations do. While this type of purchasing power has been wielded in the past, notably through agreements such as the GSA Agreement in the USA and the work of OGC Buying Solutions in the UK, it is much more unusual to see a small country like Scotland being able to do the same.

Now that the precedent has been set, at this smaller scale, government purchasing agencies in smaller countries around the world need to think about doing the same - gathering together demand from their diaspora and pressing for recognition of their aggregate purchasing power. Of course, this doesn't only apply to Oracle purchasing but to all IT-related spending with the technology majors such as Microsoft, HP, IBM, et al...