Am I hearing you right? What's that about (I just took the site for what it was as a first-time visitor)?

It’s basically funded by institutions in and around that department of the university. So lots of Austrian grands and stuff so people could create this system. I checked it because it happens to be I am doing research on this type of software for a client, so I was curious if there was an open source version of the software (there didn’t seem to be) and to just see what it was about.

Since there isn’t an open source version, I didn’t dive deeper into the slowness of it or it’s architecture.

Thanks for that. (I suppose I'm a little more curious than usual as I used to live not far from that university some years back.)

Parkinson's Law, paraphrased: "work expands so as to fill the time and budget available for its completion."

I see this so many times in my line of work (software development, consultancy); companies throw millions at a solved problem like e-commerce, the over-enthusiastic engineers jump on it but won't just pick something off the shelf, they will re-engineer it in $cool_tech because just solving the problem is boring.