California cancels Oracle contract.

• Position: News Briefs

The State of California in July canceled its $100 million-plus, 10-year contract with Oracle for database software--a deal that exposed serious problems in the state's contracting system, spurred the elimination of the Department of Information Technology, and resulted in the forced resignations of three administration officials. The state paid about $3.6 million to the software giant to get out of the contract it entered into in May 2001. The deal was heralded as a way to save taxpayers millions of dollars in software licensing fees over the next decade. But Governor Gray Davis ordered the state to kill the contract in May following an audit that revealed that state officials had...