Comments on: Wall Street Crisis, Enterprise Technology and Cloud Computing

By: CTO Bob Gourley

CTO Bob Gourley — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:08:20 +0000

Thanks Jeffrey and Lewis for the great comments. This is definitely an area we all need to think/read/study about. In fact, maybe we should engage our friend and comrade Lisa Gross and see what Gartner is thinking/reporting in this area. I bet they are diving into these TCO issues. I wonder how much of the Gartner symposium will be devoted to these topics. Wish I was going this year.

By: lewis shepherd

lewis shepherd — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 02:56:05 +0000

Jeff, I was speaking about GAE, but also about the other suite of online apps Bob mentions. I observe that the TCO of Google's online hosted apps exceeds that of other *already adopted* enterprise-class apps, once you factor in the absolutely inevitable human-heavy costs of making their use fit your enterprise. There is emerging evidence of buyer remorse (and remember, enterprises *do* have to pay for use of Gmail etc) per seat; that adds to TCO but my point is on actual and usually unexpected maintenance costs; just because it's not maintenance in the same sense as an Exchange server doesn't mean all that wrapping code for custom uses is free, and it's generally for features that were coded into your SAP or Oracle or Microsoft years ago…

By: Jeffrey

Jeffrey — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 05:03:52 +0000

Lewis was speaking to this service, Bob – http://code.google.com/appengine/
Amazon offers Amazon Web Services and Microsoft is coming out with a comparable app engine code-named Red Dog.
There probably will be a shift by small enterprises and startups to those services to save development costs, as well as to the services that you were referring to – Googles' online Office-style applications. I'd be very surprised to see either offering adopted on a wide-scale by the Fortune 1000 though for the same reasons that Lewis outlined above.

By: lewis shepherd

lewis shepherd — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:17:40 +0000

Agree with most of your comments (including the career advice), with the minor exception of the "run towards Google Apps." In fact I think most enterprise CIOs are going to realize they can't hire the large numbers of humans they'd need to integrate/maintain/tweak open-source apps, and will instead rely on the lower-maintenance cost of established enterprise-class apps (Oracle, Microsoft, etc)… these are typically on existing licenses of predictable costs, with low-overhead maintenance, not requiring increased staff to go "free" … underlining the old truth "You get what you pay for" and in down times being the safe option.