IBM Cognos gets sweet deal from Massachusetts pols

UPDATE 3/12: The state of Massachusetts has cancelled this contract according to the March 12 Boston Globe (may require subscription other than on day of publication)

UPDATE 3/11: The third to last sentence has been changed since the original posting. I am using a new blogging engine and sent it public before I had checked a fact. I do not know if the then Massachusetts IT director, who later resigned over alleged travel-expense irregularities, had Sun appointed to the taskforce or whether Sun's appointment was arranged by someone else. Also I do not believe Cognos was part of IBM when the sales process described in the Boston Globe article referenced below began.

For all the "open IT" crowd out there disturbed that Microsoft bribed a bunch of Swedish kids into voting for the Open Office XML document format, read the March 10 Boston Globe (possibly only available by subscription other than on the day it ran). As usual Massachusetts shows you how the big boys play ball. Here's the lead:

"The state inspector general has found that a Canadian software company was improperly awarded a $13 million contract last year in an unusually rushed deal in which House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi had an active interest. At almost every turn, DiMasi, his aides, or his friends played a role in either creating a demand for Cognos ULC's computer software or in pushing Cognos to the head of the bidding field. DiMasi personally met with the state's chief information officer to push for the kind of software that Cognos produces. A middleman in the deal, Joseph Lally, portrayed himself to key state officials as DiMasi's friend. A longtime DiMasi friend, Richard McDonough, was hired as a lobbyist for Cognos and was paid $100,000 by the company."

It goes on from there to allege all kinds of corruption. Open IT types are always talking about the Sun/IBM attempt to railroad ODF through the Massachusetts state legislature. Massachusetts quickly saw that its “independent” IT taskforce was run by IBM Global Services on a consulting contract and jury rigged by having Sun appointed to it. Even the Massachusetts legislators, the guys that perfected hardball political machination, were appalled. The ODF standardization ploy never even made it “out of committee.”