The CIO of GDF Suez protests against the attitude of the large software companies which want to get a maximum of money to the detriment of their customers. Besides, her projects are the smart city, the use of Big Data and Cloud Computing.
Enough is enough. Véronique Durant Charlot, CIO of the group GDF Suez expressed her discontent with the policy of licenses applied by the large independant software vendors (ISV). She thinks of SAP, Oracle or Microsoft. She expressed herself during a round table organized during an event on Cloud Computing, on December 9th, at the premises of the French Ministry of Finance in Bercy. GDF Suez is a French multinational electric and gaz utility company with 217 000 employee and a turnover of 97 billion euros.
It is a scandal
« The big players, the software companies, raise the costs of licenses, it is a scandal. SAP has discovered for example a sort of ‘virus’ in our contracts, the notion of ‘indirect use’, at the time we open our information system to our millions of customers. » For her, » The big ISV want to make ‘spit the animal’ as long as they can. We have only one desire, it is to save us from there! »
The situation is not new. It dates of at least two years. « The negotiations with the software vendors start again every year and it is necessary to be firm » regrets the CIO in front of this permanent arm-wrestling. She builds in particular on the actions of the USF (Club des Utilisateurs de SAP Francophones), the association of the French-speaking users of SAP, which shows itself particularly active.
Create an independent source of data
But how could she concretely emancipate from the big editors? « On the CRM, we lean more and more on Salesforce.com. For the rest, we apply the approach of ‘ containment ‘, it is a question of isolating the data to constitute a deposit of Big Data, a well of data, and reach the data without coming down again in the layers of the ERP for example. It is the access to the data that is expensive. »
The CIO of GDF Suez is particularly angry because she had to manage the creation and the deployment of a traditional information system from 2007 with classical ERP, who cost fortunes. « The regulations obliged us to redo worthless information systems during the separation of the businesses in the energy. This ERP cost hundreds of million euros » she reminds.
The Cloud arrives
« We still are finishing it, as the Cloud arrives » she notices. Actually, the ERP hardly bears fruit, and the invoices of the customers are just correctly edited, that Cloud Computing tumbles.
The CIO evokes Cloud as a progress. « For Information systems, the Cloud simplifies testing. With just dozens of kilo euros, we can test many things, and where necessary, throw. And it changes the culture of people. They learn to go fast and to throw” the CIO says.
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Photo: Véronique Durant Charlot, CIO of GDF Suez, on December 9th
