Google, Red Hat and Oracle to the Tech Rescue of the Obama Administration

By Nicole Spector
Contributing Writer

A month ago, TMCnet covered the news of the Affordable Care Act's opening day glitches.  Computers froze and systems went on the fritz as the uninsured flocked to register for the new health insurance on the exchange website. It was forecasted that the problem was probably going to persist and that further malfunctioning was expected. 

Fast forward to November 1st and the issue has still not been resolved. The government’s main site for medical coverage still suffers from repeated outages that have both users and administrators frustrated.

This is where the superheroes come in. Google, Red Hat, Oracle (News - Alert) and other tech giants are deploying dozens of computer engineers and programmers to help the Obama administration get the U.S. health-insurance exchange site up and running.

Michael Dickerson, a site reliability engineer on leave from Google (News - Alert), and Greg Gershman, innovation director for Smartphone application maker Mobomo, are among the glitch ghost busters arriving at the scene of the main site to offer assistance.

“They are working through the analytics of what happens on the site to prioritize what needs to be fixed,” said Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during a press conference call. It is said that Dickerson is working to improve the stability of the website while Gershman is “helping the development process be more agile.” Let's hope they are successful. Getting the site fixed soon is necessary for Americans who don’t have health insurance, and if it's not fixed by March 31 enrollees may have to pay a fine of as much as one-percent of their income.

The Affordable Care Act is a heated political subject, one that has drawn rigid opposition from members of the Republican Party, but these tech masters who are helping to fix the site aren't taking a side by helping. They're merely doing what they do best. Oracle chief executive officer Larry Ellison (News - Alert) may have put it best when he said, "I know it’s a very political topic. As an information technology company we are doing everything we can to help.”