Federal government ties itself to US corporations with large funds
The federal government is spending heavily on digital administration. But not for transparent software – but for Microsoft & Co, comments Kornelius Kindermann.
(Image: iX)
"The descent to the underworld is easy", wrote Virgil, but once you're down there, the ascent is all the more difficult. For the German administration and nationwide digital landscape, this underworld is the deal with the big American tech companies. The state and its citizens would literally be shackled. They would be at the mercy of the whims of listed international corporations.
The subjunctive can be dropped here: The country has long been on a chain. As a public IT service provider, the Federal Information Technology Centre (ITZBund), for example, operates numerous data centers that virtualize with VMware. The total volume of the framework agreements: more than 600 million euros. The federal government forged its own chains even tighter in 2023, with four billion hard euros to deploy the Oracle Cloud in the administration.
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The descent into the underworld is apparently not only easy, but also expensive. It would be more palatable if the money at least stayed in Germany and flowed to a national champion like SAP, for example. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz therefore recently reported enthusiastically about a cloud from the SAP spin-off Delos, which could be elevated to a national information cloud, a "very decisive moment for Germany" according to Scholz. The only stupid thing is that Microsoft is once again at the heart of it – but this time with a particularly high level of data protection, for sure! However, the Redmond company will certainly not let anyone look into the code.
But now we are already down here. A look upwards, towards the proverbial Olympus of independence, transparent source code and well-protected personal rights shows: The ascent will be just as difficult as the descent was easy. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that the offers from American giants are, of course, almost impossible to catch up with in terms of performance –, so a change initially means functional losses. Secondly, the stairway to the top is really not in good shape.
Hardly any money for openDesk, huge sums for MS365
For example, there is now the openDesk office suite for public authorities and companies, which was developed with open source in mind and is in direct competition with Microsoft 365. The Federal Ministry of the Interior has handed over sponsorship to ZenDiS, the Center for Digital Sovereignty, which has a total of nine employees. Nine! Driving the development forward is worth around 10 million euros to the federal government – while it transferred around 197 million euros to Microsoft alone for licenses in 2023. Originally, the federal government wanted to invest another 50 million euros in open-source administrative software, but after the budget ruling , the budget shrank, and considerably so. The federal budget, which is being negotiated this week for 2025, has now almost completely cut funding for this. The promise of digital sovereignty from the coalition agreement will therefore have to be broken by the coalition government.
On the cloud side, Berlin hosting provider SysEleven is currently launching a government cloud to compete with Delos and SAP, and even already has a customer in the form of Bundesdruckerei. But as long as the federal government is on a chain or in contracts with American service providers, it is unlikely to become a "real" government cloud.
The federal government has made it doubly difficult for itself here: Not only is it faced with the challenge of developing its own solutions, it is also confronted with having to withdraw from existing ones and convert the slow-start digitization of the administration. State by state, authority by authority, fragmented, opaque, underfunded. On the user side, this will automatically meet with reluctance and frustration, not to mention uniformity. In the Divine Comedy, Virgil took Dante by the hand and advised him: "You must take a different path if you want to escape from this wilderness."
This commentary is the editorial of the new iX 10/2024, which will appear in the heise Shop on September 19 and on newsstands on September 20.
(kki)
