There were just six weeks to develop it.
And the concepts where developed before by public research institutes for a tiny fraction of that price (not included).
(If you insist, here is a small calculation. Let‘s say we charge a whopping 500 Euros per hour per engineer. In other words an engineer that costs 1 million per year. And we have 6 weeks time which was all they had. And let’s take 20 people for that. And let‘s add 500.000 for some overhead. Then that‘s still just about 3 million. And I‘ve used insane numbers for a product that trivial.)
Secondly you are only taking in "development work", but such a contract entails other things - certainly there is a penalty if they deliver too late - there is legal risk to cover, if they deliver crap in some legal sense they are liable - probably SAP had other contracts which they had to postpone - count in all the lawyers writing the contract :-D
And yes, they certainly made a profit out of this and yes a proper biding procedure might be better, but given the timelines and the transparency I think it's ok.
Let‘s assume another million for lawyers „writing the contract“. It‘s still far off.
Additionally let‘s remember the 20 million is just for the development. It does not include running the thing. That‘s what the other 50+ million are for.
I don‘t agree. I run a business myself. I charge plenty. I know how much DAX size companies charge as well. The numbers don‘t add up, and this is especially true for something that could have been done pro bono by SAP in the current situation where pretty much everyone tries to do whatever they can.
- 9.5M development (SAP)
- 7.8M setup/operations (Telekom)
- 2M Support(SAP)
+ Tax
So, in the books, development is 10M, not 20M
(german source, un-paywalled: https://outline.com/UYqb5b)
... celebratory cocaine for the entire sales team, new yacht bonuses for the entire executive team, another few mil into the CTO's golden handshake fund, and a brown paper bag full of unmarked notes for the gov procurement guy. Poor bastards probably barely broke even on the project - certainly not enough to pay out any bonuses to the devs or project managers...
Additionally, for that price you could have easily have 3 independent teams develop it and take the best one and still be cheaper and better.
I hope someone will challenge this in court. I don‘t think they can get away without a call for bids which should have been done (across Europe, as the law requires).
And frankly nobody thinks "wow, Germany has a working COVID app" since almost everyone else has it too. Even Italy, amongst a ton of screw ups, has managed to produce a perfectly fine open source contact tracing app.
US, UK, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Chile, Belgium, Sweden are significantly affected countries without one.
I don't expect Germany to get a wow, only abscense of negative press.
Small exchange from the British Parliament: https://youtu.be/atAy8NGOoiw
An illegal subsidy. Public contracts require a bidding process, usually across Europe.
It‘s unfair that smaller companies don‘t get a chance.
I reject the idea that Germany should prop up its biggest companies, excluding what really is the backbone of the German economy (which works very differently from the US one) and also excluding our partners across all of Europe.
