“The aim is to drastically reduce the license costs paid to this publisher, whose pricing policy is particularly aggressive.”
Oracle would have appreciated this remark that Audran Le Baron made to the National Assembly’s inquiry commission on digital dependencies.
The Ministry of National Education says it was compelled to sign a new contract
The person in question is the Director of Digital Education at the Ministry of National Education. The ministry spends just over €1 million per year on Oracle components outside databases. This includes, notably, identity management for email across the academies. The goal is to move away from that toward a national offering based on Zimbra. “I’m talking here about 1.2 million personal mailboxes and 300,000 functional mailboxes,” explains Audran Le Baron. The transition is underway (early April, 420,000 mailboxes had migrated).
The ministry also runs the WebLogic server for a large portion of its web applications. On the database side, its mainstay is IBM Db2. By the end of 2025, Oracle forced it to subscribe to a new Unlimited License Agreement (ULA) that was not budgeted for; according to Audran Le Baron, it amounts to a little over €3 million and has been renewed for three years. This is the window the ministry has set to “drastically reduce the number of active licenses” within its IT department…
Oracle costs more than €8 million a year for the DGFiP
At the DGFiP (Direction générale des finances publiques), many applications still rely on Oracle. The publisher “represents €8.5 million annually,” according to Tomasz Blanc, head of the IT services. It supports, among others, the online income declaration and local accounting.
“The functional richness of these tools makes their replacement long and costly,” acknowledges Tomasz Blanc. The DGFiP has nevertheless managed to move almost entirely away from Oracle in the corporate tax domain. He attributes this success, among other things, to the standardization of application development. “An essential discipline because by avoiding the overly specific features of proprietary products, such as Oracle’s exclusive optimizations, we gain the upper hand in commercial negotiations.”
Open source? Yes, but…
For Yves Billon, head of the digital service at the Secretariat General of the Ministries of Economy and Finance, Oracle is “a technology with which we have been unanimously in difficulty at the interministerial level, and this for a very long time.”
“We try to rely as often as possible on open-source alternative solutions,” he says. “But this approach carries technical risks because we cannot miss certain deadlines, such as the annual tax declaration campaign.”
Nevertheless, for about “5 or 6 years,” Oracle has not been used for new projects.
When enterprise software imposes proprietary databases
The testimony of Marie-Pierre Fontanel echoes Yves Billon’s regarding the hurdles to moving to open-source tools. “It isn’t always possible, because some enterprise resource planning (ERP) software requires proprietary databases,” says the CNRS IT department.
The institute is specifically targeting migrations to PostgreSQL. Urssaf has already made this move, noted Stéphanie Schaer, interministerial director of digital. The National Gendarmerie is in the same dynamic, according to General of the Army Marc Boget, director of Anfsi (the Internal Security Digital Agency).
At Inrae, the ERP has shifted from Oracle to a SAP-based solution shared within ESR (Higher Education and Research), reports Louis-Augustin Julien, its deputy director-general for resources.
Ugap breaks away from Oracle
Also invited to testify, David Amiel stressed that Ugap would stop selling Oracle software on its dedicated market, outside renewals. “This is a strong signal sent to public procurement as a whole,” says the Minister of Action and Public Accounts. Renewals will remain possible “to ensure continuity and give time to carry out some very heavy migrations. But we will stop deepening this dependence and disseminating it into new public entities.”
“Ugap has long reflected the market, remarks Alain Garnier, president of Jamespot. When you opened the software purchasing page on the site, you’d see a big Microsoft logo, a big Oracle logo, and a big SAS Institute logo. The rest was contained in a Microsoft Excel file.”
The purchasing hub “is clearly changing its stance,” he welcomes. “We are working with CSF [Strategic Committee for Software and Trusted Digital Solutions] to change not only procurement policies, but also how the offer is marketed, so that public buyers are no longer steered toward the big players by what amounted to targeted advertising.
