Correct title would be "Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos".
I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites, like the high quality ones Denmark or UK have, instead of just outsourcing everything government IT related to politically connected publicly traded consultancies like Atos, Kapsch or T-Systems, which just screams of corruption and cronyism, things Austrian politicians are well versed in.
This would a much better use for taxpayer money and valuable skill build-up of the nation's tech sector(that's severely lacking in Austria) if the government did its own IT development.
Plus, a lot more locals, especially with high moral values who care more about the state of their nation than just making a quick and easy buck, would find working for their government IT services more rewarding and giving a sense of ownership in their nations, versus working for those shady consultancies who are incentivized to milk the taxpayer dry and enrich the shareholders without caring about the quality of what they deliver because of their iron clad government contracts with little accountability which they got from buttering, wining and dining the right people in power, who then get hired as "consultants"(lobbyists) in those consultancies when their political careers are over to perpetuate this revolving door to the gravy train.
> Correct title would be Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos.
From the article:
> The implementation was carried out in partnership with Atos Austria, which worked alongside Nextcloud's team to ensure the platform met the ministry's legal, technical, and organizational requirements.
So yes, while Atos seems to have been the contractor (?), the end result is that the title is correct, they've replaced whatever they used Microsoft for, with NextCloud, the process which was executed by Atos.
That's how I understood it from the article at least. 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. So for a web article, it makes sense to highlight what people might understand and recognize.
>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.
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.
At least in the US we started solving this by having high salaries for tech workers in government (see 18f and USDS, etc, both shut down by Trump), or UK's GDS which was a pioneer in this space.
If you want to attract good talent, there are successful models out there now, but you have to start by paying them way more than the average government salary. But the contractors throw lobbying money at these things and try to stop them every step of the way.
The problem isn't that governments can't hire programmers. It's that they refuse to hire programmers, and prefer to pay the same consultancies for the same programs over and over again.
I disagree. Unlike the US, tech salaries in Austrian private sector are not terribly amazing to begin with, so the Austrian government would have no issues to find labor within the budget that they gave Atos, not to mention that government workers in Austria have other perks that workers in the private sector don't have, like harder to fire, having their own private kindergartens for the workers' kids, much better pension funds and health insurance funds with more coverage and less waiting times, public housing, etc that to a lot of people will have more value than a higher paycheque in the private sector.
So IT IS technically possible to gather the labor force to build the project in house, it just isn't much political motivation to do so when you have lobbyists swaying leaders in the other direction, and the investigative journalists and voters are too tech illiterate to understand this type of grift because when the government pays a billion Euros for a bridge or a tunnel and after 10 years the bridge or tunnel is not there, everyone notices and someone needs to go to jail or at least loose their job in politics for that obvious theft.
But if you spend a billion to consultancies on a government IT project, and it's an offshored clusterfuck that barely works and could have been done better by a local shop for 1/100 of the cost, then the journalists and taxpayers have no clue they've been robbed blind because nobody understands the nitty gritty and costs of SW development, and unlike bridges and tunnels, the public can't see the source code in the open as they walk to school to see that there's nothing there, which is why government IT projects has now become the best and easiest way to funnel taxpayer money into private pockets.
I think from an efficiency standpoint it makes sense to contract out to bigger players. Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free.
The problem of course is that using someone else's proprietary, closed-source code makes you beholden to them. That's a problem for consumers but it's an even bigger problem for sovereign nations. Would be a great outcome if greater awareness of this problem lead to more state resources being invested in open source alternatives to proprietary software.
The economies of scale would work exactly the other way than you think. Right now, the same company can sell the same solution for the same money to 20 government agencies, ones that have broadly similar needs, because it costs too much for anyone else to compete with them. The company then extracts massive profit from every subsequent project, with none of the savings going to the government. And even if a new player wins some of the contracts, they have to start from scratch and thus need to charge similar prices.
If there was a government IT office, it could build this in house, and after the initial investment in building the base infra, re-use it almost for free in every government agency in the same country. In the context of the EU, they could even make moves to share this code with other governments, passing on the savings there as well.
>Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free.
If that were true, then all these government IT projects from these infamous consultancies would all come in-time and under budget, but that's never the case, because every government wants things completely different than the other government, so it's never a just a copy-paste, fire-and-forget type of job.
On time and under budget is relative to what you set the budget and deadlines to in the first place. If these companies had to rewrite Excel from scratch for every client I guarantee you the budgeted cost would be a lot higher (and they'd probably still go over that figure).
Nobody suggested rewriting Excel or even customising libre office. These projects are often ERPs which get customised to the client's requirements. Chaos and ballooning costs often follow for all the usual reasons.
My point is "completely different than the other government" is only true to an extent. Even with significant customization, there's still a lot shared which benefits immensely from economies of scale. As you said, nobody's rewriting Excel.
oh it very much is. they just act and bill like it's not.
corruption requires costs you cannot verify after delivery. for construction it's the exagerated foundation which they only actually deliver what's needed and pocket the difference. for software it is the hundreds of rewrites that may or may not have happened and are now in the past.
> I think from an efficiency standpoint it makes sense to contract out to bigger players. Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free.
I mean sure if it wasn't for the fact that those bigger players are going to be looking at this as a way to print money.
>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.
> 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/). 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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It means absolutely nothing that they "worked alongside Nextcloud's team" – I worked with a big household consulting firm (who will remain nameless), for a common client who adopted Qualtrics. The firm was a Platinum Qualtrics partner (or whatever the highest tier was).
I had never used Qualtrics, and I had to help the team figure out all kinds of basic things on how to actually configure Qualtrics. And they (on paper) were the experts supposedly. Even our common client was a bit amused about the whole thing.
It was my first experience seeing how these big firms operate. At the end of the day, some poor 28 year old at Atos (or probably outsourced to another country) who spent a few days getting some Nextcloud certification is probably doing a lot of the work, rather than thinking you're getting the best of the best who know this stuff inside out.
Let's see how it goes. At the end of the day, I (like most people) want more competition in this space. If more people use LibreOffice, hopefully that results in more investment in the product. So I hope for positive outcomes.
That's the thing with these service companies, they only hire when they get the contracts, so you can rarely expect engineers skilled and experienced with a product so many of them got introduced a few days/weeks before.
They usually merely serve as gatekeepers to the vendor support.
Atos is a gigantic French company. Fully Austrian companies like Noctua or Proxmox aren't even that famous within Austria, why would the average citizen here know about a French IT company?
> I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites
It (kinda) does: the Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ, 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.
...and the BRZ doesn't outsource most stuff? Just like the Magistrate's Dept. 1 (Vienna Digital) for state-level IT in the federal capitol? Or IT-Kommunal for municipal IT all over Austria?
As far as I'm concerned, all of these public sector ICT divisions are just a pile of contracts.
Yes of course. From the outside, I can’t tell to what extent and whether it’s being done sensibly, but there are projects where they are likely better off contracting them out, and others where there are benefits of keeping things in-house (e.g., involving subject matter experts with long involvement in some niche government area). My point was that such an organization already exists.
At the time of writing, the BRZ has spent over 2.1 billion euros in public procurement contracts above the award threshhold. [1] This is not accounting for personell costs of their 1800 in-house employees.
The dependency is much weaker in this case. Finding somebody else to manage/host Nextcloud is easy while using MS Office without Microsoft is impossible.
True the UK has some decent government websites, but those were against a wider trend of huge government spending on all the well-known big tech firms.
Whilst the UK has GDS most of our stuff is outsourced to consulting firms just like there, for example PA consulting and Accenture for home office stuff etc...
That's fun to hear somebody say on the internet. The consensus amongst my peers here in Denmark seems to be that we also outsource most of our public software to Accenture, NetCompany, and KMD. Two of these are admittedly Danish consultancy companies, but they are private consultancies.
Coming after the Austrian military ditched MS Office (365, Copilot, whatever it's called now) for LibreOffice [0]. Similar stuff going on in Denmark and to some extent in Germany [1]. Way to go!
Has Nextcloud gotten to a point where it truly competes with Google Docs? Because every time I looked at it, it didnt look like it had feature parity. Being able to edit documents with others is one feature I want out of any alternatives that I can self-host.
Or just `sudo docker run --init --sig-proxy=false --name nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer --restart always --publish 80:80 --publish 8080:8080 --publish 8443:8443 --volume nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config --volume /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro ghcr.io/nextcloud-releases/all-in-one:latest` if you follow these instructions: https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one
Is this light enough to run on a SBC (think of something with the power of a Raspberry Pi 3 or a bit more) with decent performance (for just 3-4 users)?
I was running it on an Odroid N2 for 2-3 years, and upgraded to a RK3588 Orange Pi something a couple of years ago. It's not fast but it's useable. At one point I succeded in making the collaborative editing working, but it stopped after updates. Maybe it needs more love than what I'm able to spare, but the feeling after years is that you have to accept some level of unreliability.
CryptPad uses end-to-end encryption for all documents. It has a very different use case than other collaborative office suites. You can of course still use it as a replacement, but in my experience opening documents takes a bit of time.
I think it depends on the feature set you're looking for. My nextcloud instance is basically online OpenOffice apparently. It doesn't match Google Docs in speed, responsiveness, UI or UX, and it costs me like $18/month to run, but it seems relatively light-weight. There's no idiotic gemini crap or a pop-up begging me to try it though, and all my data is my own. I'm not the Austrian government but that's the feature set I was looking for.
I started using this and overall quite good but with very minor caveats...
* My part of the world is not adjacent to Germany (where this paid offering is hosted)...so there is a little latency. But not nearly as bad as I expected.
* While file sharing and syncing and other basic stuff is included, the equivalent of online collabora (or whatever the online office suite is called) is not included and you would have to self host it...but hetzner state this in their relevant knowledge base webpages.
The current Google workspace service is about $7 a month. I'd pay more to be rid of AI, it's a near-constant nuisance, and major privacy concern. But $18 seems steep to also be missing core features.
I just want a OK spreadsheet experience I can use from the web, and host myself in my home. How does whatever Nextcloud offer for spreadsheets compare to Google Sheets?
As the other comment said, it's basically Libreoffice Calc, so try installing that on your laptop and see if you can get used to it.
My opinion: not as polished as Google Sheets, but good enough. However it's much better than the web version of excel.
Also, your experience will depend on the server your using to run it. Lots of people try to run Nextcloud on very weak hardware to save costs, and it does run well. But office in particular needs a bit more compute and memory to feel fast.
I assure you that it is not. Every organization, public and private, beyond a certain size, has people whose entire day consists of collaboratively editing documents and spreadsheets. Responding to superiors who highlight a sentence and leave comments like "@Team can we tighten this up? Thx".
As we digitize everything at work, people has done that less and less. That looks like an immediate collateral effect of paper or people that think like they are using paper.
There is still your random "let's make a list of X on the meeting", that would actually improve if you just had something that collects the items. But out of that, there has been a long time since I last saw people doing it.
If you want a full suite, the German government has been working on integrating and packaging a whole open source productivity stack: https://www.opendesk.eu/en
I mean, has Microsoft? Last two places I've worked at are in the Office ecosystem and it's incredibly bad. I need to reconcile documents all the time like it's 2005, sharing takes 15 clicks (which is why it's a massive pain to get Sharepoint AI ready, since everyone just shares with all rather than specifying with who to specifically).
With AGI supposedly around the corner and (more realistically) current LLMs performing at least incrementally better -- why are we even thinking that Microsoft's or Google's solutions will provide enough value vs competitors in 3, 5 or 10 years? Cheaper or free alternatives might soon reach feature parity, and even previously complicated deployment is now aided by AI.
Multiple years of AGI around the corner and still no demonstrated improvement in submissions to FOSS projects. If anything it's slowed them down by wasting maintainer time reviewing slop.
MS Office and other MS Products are unnecessary bloat of features and luxury that are dumped on customer only to keep the competition away. MS is YAGNI.
I get the appeal of moving away from Microsoft, but in my experience, Nextcloud is extremely bloated even for personal self-hosting. I wonder how well it will scale in a government setup.
I think it also depend if you only use it to sync and share files or if you want to use the included web apps.
But to be honest office 365 also struggle at times when using the web version of the office tools. Last week I had to do reporting on a small excel document with 4 sheets, the biggest one having less than 30 lines and 6 column and every time I had to insert a line it took 5 to 10 seconds for that line to appear and the whole excel web app was unresponsive until it appeared.
Part of a trend, but what made me an impression is that Atos helped in the transition. The old consulting companies would be more than happy to claw back some market share from the US cloud providers.
Actually, they lost a lot from the clouds providing managed services out of a box. Maybe they got some money from migrations, but this is not where the juice is.
Good, but this needs to happen on a much larger scale. These are "just" 1200 employees, but throughout Europe there are hundreds of millions of people working with Microsoft services and they all need to be torn out and replaced.
>As for the reasoning behind this move, it was prompted by a risk analysis that showed foreign cloud services failed to meet the ministry's privacy requirements, particularly regarding GDPR compliance and the upcoming NIS2 directive.
This also shows that they did it for the wrong reasons. It really doesn't matter if Microsofts services are GDPR compliant or not.
I don't mind the reason being "the right reason" or not, getting rid of Microsoft will be a net-positive regardless.
And it's a process that will take years, and be step-by-step, you can't just "torn out and replace everything" in one go, not to mention how bad of an idea that would be regardless.
I'm happy we continue to do this step by step, making sure it's working alright and is the right thing along the way.
All this money saved should be "unsaved" until a decent alternative is made. Everything that the government should spent here, should be invested into pan-european organization to develop a new office suite.
Libre office in my opinion is one of the reasons Microsoft is so dominant. Unfortunately, libre office, even though useful, is one of the worst desktop applications to use.
Everyone I proposed this to tried it and said that its horrible and they don't want to use it. And I agree with them: because libre office is so sh*t, u use Google docs.
> Libre office in my opinion is one of the reasons Microsoft is so dominant.
Microsoft Office was already dominant long before LibreOffice started. Hell, MSO was already dominant when StarOffice was renamed OpenOffice.org, long before LibreOffice was a thought in anyone's mind.
> Unfortunately, libre office, even though useful, is one of the worst desktop applications to use.
You only feel this way because you're used to MS Office. Ask anyone who's more well versed in Google Workspace and they'll tell you that MS is difficult to use.
Yes Microsoft Office was already dominant. Why didn't libre office affect this dominance being 'so good'? It's also free, so it should be interesting to companies, right? Wrong. I recently set up an SME who when saw it ran away and immediately bought a Microsoft license, which means they would rather pay and be spied on than use libre office.
Believe it or not, people like nice things. Microsoft Office looks nice. Libre office looks like a car accident. It's shallow, I know, but this is the response I get every time.
Everyone I know hates it. It is a small sample, true, but it says something. So I think, the fact Microsoft is so strong is to be blamed on the alternatives, or in this case only one alternative.
Turn it around. If it would be good, people would jump on it. Especially small companies.
Google workspace is a web app, no? So it being better than desktop is comparing different things. I use it and I like it, especially since I don't need advanced Features Microsoft offers
We have no good alternative. We have an alternative.
> You only feel this way because you're used to MS Office.
You are kind of proving the point. You point to a Google product as a good alternative, not to the OSS product. I really want to like LibreOffice and it is a good product for what it is, but it is far from being a great product.
Libreoffice is fine, better than we deserve. If they want it to be even better, maybe instead of throwing a few hundred million at MS, they could throw a few hundred million at Libreoffice. It's old as hell and kept up by charity.
The idea that Libreoffice is so bad that giving up your freedom to Google or Microsoft is unavoidable just shows your actual level of objection to being slaves to US companies is close to zero. You'll only be pried away from your dependence on the latest popular versions of US products kicking, screaming, and complaining the entire time. You wouldn't be satisfied with anything but a clone, and you'd complain that the clone lacked the most obscure features of the real thing.
And it's not just you, but a typical sort of aimless ridicule of FOSS product from people who feel guilty about not using them when their professed politics say they should. You'll talk a big game about independence, but your fictional pan-European office suite is far worse than Libreoffice, seeing as it doesn't exist. Couldn't be more feature-light.
I disagree completely. If libre office would be fine, it would be popular. And, as said, most of the people I know avoid it like a plague.
Also, im not trying to ridicule FOSS as a whole. if anything I'm a financial supporter for several projects and organizations. It's not a lot of money, but it's every month.
So, no, it's not this.
The proposal would be to fund something like collabora, build on top of libre office or do something greenfield, but all this money that was supposed to go to Microsoft should be redirected.
Decision that governments did are not based on the fact that libre office is good. It's based on 1) political reasons called digital sovereignty and 2) price. Maybe 3) being pissed at trump. They didn't do it because LO was good.
Some american products have no good alternatives, yet. Some do, like windows can be replaced with gnome, but mobile phones cannot. Probably you are not typing or reading this from a European os on your phone, yet alternatives exist. Just not good ones.
Microsoft Office clone is not what I want, but what I would accept. Let's say UI should be very similar to Microsoft Office or even better Google office. That's it. Make it in a desktop suite and we are all good.
Correct title would be "Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos".
I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites, like the high quality ones Denmark or UK have, instead of just outsourcing everything government IT related to politically connected publicly traded consultancies like Atos, Kapsch or T-Systems, which just screams of corruption and cronyism, things Austrian politicians are well versed in.
This would a much better use for taxpayer money and valuable skill build-up of the nation's tech sector(that's severely lacking in Austria) if the government did its own IT development.
Plus, a lot more locals, especially with high moral values who care more about the state of their nation than just making a quick and easy buck, would find working for their government IT services more rewarding and giving a sense of ownership in their nations, versus working for those shady consultancies who are incentivized to milk the taxpayer dry and enrich the shareholders without caring about the quality of what they deliver because of their iron clad government contracts with little accountability which they got from buttering, wining and dining the right people in power, who then get hired as "consultants"(lobbyists) in those consultancies when their political careers are over to perpetuate this revolving door to the gravy train.
> Correct title would be Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos.
From the article:
> The implementation was carried out in partnership with Atos Austria, which worked alongside Nextcloud's team to ensure the platform met the ministry's legal, technical, and organizational requirements.
So yes, while Atos seems to have been the contractor (?), the end result is that the title is correct, they've replaced whatever they used Microsoft for, with NextCloud, the process which was executed by Atos.
That's how I understood it from the article at least. 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. So for a web article, it makes sense to highlight what people might understand and recognize.
>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.
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.
At least in the US we started solving this by having high salaries for tech workers in government (see 18f and USDS, etc, both shut down by Trump), or UK's GDS which was a pioneer in this space.
If you want to attract good talent, there are successful models out there now, but you have to start by paying them way more than the average government salary. But the contractors throw lobbying money at these things and try to stop them every step of the way.
The problem isn't that governments can't hire programmers. It's that they refuse to hire programmers, and prefer to pay the same consultancies for the same programs over and over again.
I disagree. Unlike the US, tech salaries in Austrian private sector are not terribly amazing to begin with, so the Austrian government would have no issues to find labor within the budget that they gave Atos, not to mention that government workers in Austria have other perks that workers in the private sector don't have, like harder to fire, having their own private kindergartens for the workers' kids, much better pension funds and health insurance funds with more coverage and less waiting times, public housing, etc that to a lot of people will have more value than a higher paycheque in the private sector.
So IT IS technically possible to gather the labor force to build the project in house, it just isn't much political motivation to do so when you have lobbyists swaying leaders in the other direction, and the investigative journalists and voters are too tech illiterate to understand this type of grift because when the government pays a billion Euros for a bridge or a tunnel and after 10 years the bridge or tunnel is not there, everyone notices and someone needs to go to jail or at least loose their job in politics for that obvious theft.
But if you spend a billion to consultancies on a government IT project, and it's an offshored clusterfuck that barely works and could have been done better by a local shop for 1/100 of the cost, then the journalists and taxpayers have no clue they've been robbed blind because nobody understands the nitty gritty and costs of SW development, and unlike bridges and tunnels, the public can't see the source code in the open as they walk to school to see that there's nothing there, which is why government IT projects has now become the best and easiest way to funnel taxpayer money into private pockets.
I think from an efficiency standpoint it makes sense to contract out to bigger players. Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free.
The problem of course is that using someone else's proprietary, closed-source code makes you beholden to them. That's a problem for consumers but it's an even bigger problem for sovereign nations. Would be a great outcome if greater awareness of this problem lead to more state resources being invested in open source alternatives to proprietary software.
The economies of scale would work exactly the other way than you think. Right now, the same company can sell the same solution for the same money to 20 government agencies, ones that have broadly similar needs, because it costs too much for anyone else to compete with them. The company then extracts massive profit from every subsequent project, with none of the savings going to the government. And even if a new player wins some of the contracts, they have to start from scratch and thus need to charge similar prices.
If there was a government IT office, it could build this in house, and after the initial investment in building the base infra, re-use it almost for free in every government agency in the same country. In the context of the EU, they could even make moves to share this code with other governments, passing on the savings there as well.
>Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free.
If that were true, then all these government IT projects from these infamous consultancies would all come in-time and under budget, but that's never the case, because every government wants things completely different than the other government, so it's never a just a copy-paste, fire-and-forget type of job.
On time and under budget is relative to what you set the budget and deadlines to in the first place. If these companies had to rewrite Excel from scratch for every client I guarantee you the budgeted cost would be a lot higher (and they'd probably still go over that figure).
Nobody suggested rewriting Excel or even customising libre office. These projects are often ERPs which get customised to the client's requirements. Chaos and ballooning costs often follow for all the usual reasons.
My point is "completely different than the other government" is only true to an extent. Even with significant customization, there's still a lot shared which benefits immensely from economies of scale. As you said, nobody's rewriting Excel.
oh it very much is. they just act and bill like it's not.
corruption requires costs you cannot verify after delivery. for construction it's the exagerated foundation which they only actually deliver what's needed and pocket the difference. for software it is the hundreds of rewrites that may or may not have happened and are now in the past.
> corruption requires costs you cannot verify after delivery.
No, that is plain fraud. Corruption is paying so that no one notices or cares about the the costs that can't be justified after delivery.
> I think from an efficiency standpoint it makes sense to contract out to bigger players. Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since once it's written copying and running code is basically free.
I mean sure if it wasn't for the fact that those bigger players are going to be looking at this as a way to print money.
>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.
> 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/). 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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It means absolutely nothing that they "worked alongside Nextcloud's team" – I worked with a big household consulting firm (who will remain nameless), for a common client who adopted Qualtrics. The firm was a Platinum Qualtrics partner (or whatever the highest tier was).
I had never used Qualtrics, and I had to help the team figure out all kinds of basic things on how to actually configure Qualtrics. And they (on paper) were the experts supposedly. Even our common client was a bit amused about the whole thing.
It was my first experience seeing how these big firms operate. At the end of the day, some poor 28 year old at Atos (or probably outsourced to another country) who spent a few days getting some Nextcloud certification is probably doing a lot of the work, rather than thinking you're getting the best of the best who know this stuff inside out.
Let's see how it goes. At the end of the day, I (like most people) want more competition in this space. If more people use LibreOffice, hopefully that results in more investment in the product. So I hope for positive outcomes.
That's the thing with these service companies, they only hire when they get the contracts, so you can rarely expect engineers skilled and experienced with a product so many of them got introduced a few days/weeks before.
They usually merely serve as gatekeepers to the vendor support.
Atos is a gigantic French company. Fully Austrian companies like Noctua or Proxmox aren't even that famous within Austria, why would the average citizen here know about a French IT company?
Microsoft isn't a product or service. Nextcloud is. They either replaced Microsoft with Atos, or they replaced Office365 with Nextcloud.
why not both?
Irrelevant to the point.
> I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites
It (kinda) does: the Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ, 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.
...and the BRZ doesn't outsource most stuff? Just like the Magistrate's Dept. 1 (Vienna Digital) for state-level IT in the federal capitol? Or IT-Kommunal for municipal IT all over Austria?
As far as I'm concerned, all of these public sector ICT divisions are just a pile of contracts.
Yes of course. From the outside, I can’t tell to what extent and whether it’s being done sensibly, but there are projects where they are likely better off contracting them out, and others where there are benefits of keeping things in-house (e.g., involving subject matter experts with long involvement in some niche government area). My point was that such an organization already exists.
At the time of writing, the BRZ has spent over 2.1 billion euros in public procurement contracts above the award threshhold. [1] This is not accounting for personell costs of their 1800 in-house employees.
[1] https://offenevergaben.at/auftraggeber/8983
The dependency is much weaker in this case. Finding somebody else to manage/host Nextcloud is easy while using MS Office without Microsoft is impossible.
True the UK has some decent government websites, but those were against a wider trend of huge government spending on all the well-known big tech firms.
I’m 100% confident and Microsoft installation would also have required working with a local reseller/contractor.
It would probably have been ATOS itself.
Whilst the UK has GDS most of our stuff is outsourced to consulting firms just like there, for example PA consulting and Accenture for home office stuff etc...
Frank Stronach needs to lead a Hundertschaft unternehmerischer nachhaltiger Digitalisierung.
> high quality ones Denmark
That's fun to hear somebody say on the internet. The consensus amongst my peers here in Denmark seems to be that we also outsource most of our public software to Accenture, NetCompany, and KMD. Two of these are admittedly Danish consultancy companies, but they are private consultancies.
Coming after the Austrian military ditched MS Office (365, Copilot, whatever it's called now) for LibreOffice [0]. Similar stuff going on in Denmark and to some extent in Germany [1]. Way to go!
[0] https://news.itsfoss.com/austrian-forces-ditch-microsoft-off...
[1] https://cybernews.com/tech/microsoft-why-germany-open-source...
I do wonder whether a lot of Europe is starting to decouple from U.S. tech.
Has Nextcloud gotten to a point where it truly competes with Google Docs? Because every time I looked at it, it didnt look like it had feature parity. Being able to edit documents with others is one feature I want out of any alternatives that I can self-host.
https://nextcloud.com/office/ seems to be exactly that.
Self hosting seems to consist of "set up nextcloud, set up collabora, click the integration button" https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-to-install-nextcloud-office/
Or just `sudo docker run --init --sig-proxy=false --name nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer --restart always --publish 80:80 --publish 8080:8080 --publish 8443:8443 --volume nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config --volume /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro ghcr.io/nextcloud-releases/all-in-one:latest` if you follow these instructions: https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one
That’s not very secure, giving a :latest container access to the docker socket…
You can run Libreoffice on Nextcloud with online editing, such that two people can open a file and edit it at the same time.
I host a small server for family and it seems to work well:
https://hub.docker.com/r/collabora/code/
Is this light enough to run on a SBC (think of something with the power of a Raspberry Pi 3 or a bit more) with decent performance (for just 3-4 users)?
I was running it on an Odroid N2 for 2-3 years, and upgraded to a RK3588 Orange Pi something a couple of years ago. It's not fast but it's useable. At one point I succeded in making the collaborative editing working, but it stopped after updates. Maybe it needs more love than what I'm able to spare, but the feeling after years is that you have to accept some level of unreliability.
>Being able to edit documents with others is one feature I want out of any alternatives that I can self-host.
CryptPad just seems more secure compare to Nextcloud.
Why?
It has crypt in the name
CryptPad uses end-to-end encryption for all documents. It has a very different use case than other collaborative office suites. You can of course still use it as a replacement, but in my experience opening documents takes a bit of time.
I think it depends on the feature set you're looking for. My nextcloud instance is basically online OpenOffice apparently. It doesn't match Google Docs in speed, responsiveness, UI or UX, and it costs me like $18/month to run, but it seems relatively light-weight. There's no idiotic gemini crap or a pop-up begging me to try it though, and all my data is my own. I'm not the Austrian government but that's the feature set I was looking for.
Hetzner offer managed next cloud for 5 euro with 1tb storage. 13 euro for 5tb.
I started using this and overall quite good but with very minor caveats...
* My part of the world is not adjacent to Germany (where this paid offering is hosted)...so there is a little latency. But not nearly as bad as I expected.
* While file sharing and syncing and other basic stuff is included, the equivalent of online collabora (or whatever the online office suite is called) is not included and you would have to self host it...but hetzner state this in their relevant knowledge base webpages.
The current Google workspace service is about $7 a month. I'd pay more to be rid of AI, it's a near-constant nuisance, and major privacy concern. But $18 seems steep to also be missing core features.
$7 per user. So if you have three people using the server, it becomes cheaper.
I just want a OK spreadsheet experience I can use from the web, and host myself in my home. How does whatever Nextcloud offer for spreadsheets compare to Google Sheets?
As the other comment said, it's basically Libreoffice Calc, so try installing that on your laptop and see if you can get used to it.
My opinion: not as polished as Google Sheets, but good enough. However it's much better than the web version of excel.
Also, your experience will depend on the server your using to run it. Lots of people try to run Nextcloud on very weak hardware to save costs, and it does run well. But office in particular needs a bit more compute and memory to feel fast.
Nextcloud editors use Collabora Online, which is apparently a fork/derivative of LibreOffice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora_Online
Collaborative editing is very niche, and I highly doubt it's used in government work.
>Collaborative editing is very niche
I assure you that it is not. Every organization, public and private, beyond a certain size, has people whose entire day consists of collaboratively editing documents and spreadsheets. Responding to superiors who highlight a sentence and leave comments like "@Team can we tighten this up? Thx".
As we digitize everything at work, people has done that less and less. That looks like an immediate collateral effect of paper or people that think like they are using paper.
There is still your random "let's make a list of X on the meeting", that would actually improve if you just had something that collects the items. But out of that, there has been a long time since I last saw people doing it.
Very niche? That depends a lot on the culture (I use that daily).
I'm not sure about Nextcloud, but the French government built a thing that looks pretty good: https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/home/
If you want a full suite, the German government has been working on integrating and packaging a whole open source productivity stack: https://www.opendesk.eu/en
I applaud both efforts but openDesk is mainly aimed at governments and usually only implements 3rd party OSS.
Their file storage solution is Nextcloud, chat is element, etc.
I mean, has Microsoft? Last two places I've worked at are in the Office ecosystem and it's incredibly bad. I need to reconcile documents all the time like it's 2005, sharing takes 15 clicks (which is why it's a massive pain to get Sharepoint AI ready, since everyone just shares with all rather than specifying with who to specifically).
On the other hand, not depending on trans-ocean entity is feature Google Docs can't offer. And that one is high priority these days.
With AGI supposedly around the corner and (more realistically) current LLMs performing at least incrementally better -- why are we even thinking that Microsoft's or Google's solutions will provide enough value vs competitors in 3, 5 or 10 years? Cheaper or free alternatives might soon reach feature parity, and even previously complicated deployment is now aided by AI.
Multiple years of AGI around the corner and still no demonstrated improvement in submissions to FOSS projects. If anything it's slowed them down by wasting maintainer time reviewing slop.
No one cares
MS Office and other MS Products are unnecessary bloat of features and luxury that are dumped on customer only to keep the competition away. MS is YAGNI.
Great to see how Open-source alternatives have matured enough that even governments are pushing to use them!
Countries serious about work they don’t want leaking should invest in homegrown talent, no one can be trusted.
Looks like training the users ahead of time led to a faster migration with fewer problems.
I get the appeal of moving away from Microsoft, but in my experience, Nextcloud is extremely bloated even for personal self-hosting. I wonder how well it will scale in a government setup.
I think it also depend if you only use it to sync and share files or if you want to use the included web apps.
But to be honest office 365 also struggle at times when using the web version of the office tools. Last week I had to do reporting on a small excel document with 4 sheets, the biggest one having less than 30 lines and 6 column and every time I had to insert a line it took 5 to 10 seconds for that line to appear and the whole excel web app was unresponsive until it appeared.
Part of a trend, but what made me an impression is that Atos helped in the transition. The old consulting companies would be more than happy to claw back some market share from the US cloud providers.
Of course! Sell the disease and the cure.
Actually, they lost a lot from the clouds providing managed services out of a box. Maybe they got some money from migrations, but this is not where the juice is.
Nextcloud is great, easy self-hosting, lots of features.
Mom hates teams, and wants skype back.
Good, but this needs to happen on a much larger scale. These are "just" 1200 employees, but throughout Europe there are hundreds of millions of people working with Microsoft services and they all need to be torn out and replaced.
>As for the reasoning behind this move, it was prompted by a risk analysis that showed foreign cloud services failed to meet the ministry's privacy requirements, particularly regarding GDPR compliance and the upcoming NIS2 directive.
This also shows that they did it for the wrong reasons. It really doesn't matter if Microsofts services are GDPR compliant or not.
I don't mind the reason being "the right reason" or not, getting rid of Microsoft will be a net-positive regardless.
And it's a process that will take years, and be step-by-step, you can't just "torn out and replace everything" in one go, not to mention how bad of an idea that would be regardless.
I'm happy we continue to do this step by step, making sure it's working alright and is the right thing along the way.
All this money saved should be "unsaved" until a decent alternative is made. Everything that the government should spent here, should be invested into pan-european organization to develop a new office suite.
Libre office in my opinion is one of the reasons Microsoft is so dominant. Unfortunately, libre office, even though useful, is one of the worst desktop applications to use.
Everyone I proposed this to tried it and said that its horrible and they don't want to use it. And I agree with them: because libre office is so sh*t, u use Google docs.
> Libre office in my opinion is one of the reasons Microsoft is so dominant.
Microsoft Office was already dominant long before LibreOffice started. Hell, MSO was already dominant when StarOffice was renamed OpenOffice.org, long before LibreOffice was a thought in anyone's mind.
> Unfortunately, libre office, even though useful, is one of the worst desktop applications to use.
You only feel this way because you're used to MS Office. Ask anyone who's more well versed in Google Workspace and they'll tell you that MS is difficult to use.
Yes Microsoft Office was already dominant. Why didn't libre office affect this dominance being 'so good'? It's also free, so it should be interesting to companies, right? Wrong. I recently set up an SME who when saw it ran away and immediately bought a Microsoft license, which means they would rather pay and be spied on than use libre office.
Believe it or not, people like nice things. Microsoft Office looks nice. Libre office looks like a car accident. It's shallow, I know, but this is the response I get every time.
Everyone I know hates it. It is a small sample, true, but it says something. So I think, the fact Microsoft is so strong is to be blamed on the alternatives, or in this case only one alternative.
We need to look at this as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Turn it around. If it would be good, people would jump on it. Especially small companies.
Google workspace is a web app, no? So it being better than desktop is comparing different things. I use it and I like it, especially since I don't need advanced Features Microsoft offers
We have no good alternative. We have an alternative.
If your criteria for a good alternative is people like it the very first time they see it, you'll never find a good alternative.
>Google workspace is a web app, no?
American company, no alternative at all.
Microsoft products are web apps as well.
> You only feel this way because you're used to MS Office.
You are kind of proving the point. You point to a Google product as a good alternative, not to the OSS product. I really want to like LibreOffice and it is a good product for what it is, but it is far from being a great product.
Libreoffice is fine, better than we deserve. If they want it to be even better, maybe instead of throwing a few hundred million at MS, they could throw a few hundred million at Libreoffice. It's old as hell and kept up by charity.
The idea that Libreoffice is so bad that giving up your freedom to Google or Microsoft is unavoidable just shows your actual level of objection to being slaves to US companies is close to zero. You'll only be pried away from your dependence on the latest popular versions of US products kicking, screaming, and complaining the entire time. You wouldn't be satisfied with anything but a clone, and you'd complain that the clone lacked the most obscure features of the real thing.
And it's not just you, but a typical sort of aimless ridicule of FOSS product from people who feel guilty about not using them when their professed politics say they should. You'll talk a big game about independence, but your fictional pan-European office suite is far worse than Libreoffice, seeing as it doesn't exist. Couldn't be more feature-light.
I disagree completely. If libre office would be fine, it would be popular. And, as said, most of the people I know avoid it like a plague.
Also, im not trying to ridicule FOSS as a whole. if anything I'm a financial supporter for several projects and organizations. It's not a lot of money, but it's every month. So, no, it's not this.
The proposal would be to fund something like collabora, build on top of libre office or do something greenfield, but all this money that was supposed to go to Microsoft should be redirected.
Decision that governments did are not based on the fact that libre office is good. It's based on 1) political reasons called digital sovereignty and 2) price. Maybe 3) being pissed at trump. They didn't do it because LO was good.
Some american products have no good alternatives, yet. Some do, like windows can be replaced with gnome, but mobile phones cannot. Probably you are not typing or reading this from a European os on your phone, yet alternatives exist. Just not good ones.
Microsoft Office clone is not what I want, but what I would accept. Let's say UI should be very similar to Microsoft Office or even better Google office. That's it. Make it in a desktop suite and we are all good.
But do not ignore the UI part of the app.
Calling NIS2 'upcoming' legislation at this point is as funny as it is sad.