Comments on: Your Investment in Enterprise Software – Guidelines to CIOs and CFOs

By: Agile Across the Enterprise | just write click

Agile Across the Enterprise | just write click — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:06:52 +0000

[...] and relevant training materials, and a helpful support staff. Those departments want to avoid the continual cost center perception. To do so, they find ways to add to the bottom line, such [...]

By: Agile Across the Enterprise: Prioritizing Value in Support and Training – Guest Post by Anne Gentle « The Agile Executive

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:35:49 +0000

By: Agile Considerations for CXOs « The Agile Executive

Agile Considerations for CXOs « The Agile Executive — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 01:41:24 +0000

[...] Enterprise software considerations [...]

By: israelgat

israelgat — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:26:46 +0000

Paul's good points bring SaaS considerations to the fore. Economies of scale in very large data centers are far superior to those in smaller data centers. The choice is really between a 5X or higher multiple for one's own implementation versus SaaS fees over a five year period. The Joys of Real Hardware touches on some of the operational challenges of rolling your own at scale. Israel

By: Paul Brownell

Paul Brownell — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:53:10 +0000

I agree with the concept that measuring technical debt can be very useful in vendor evaluation. For an established product, a simple measure can be found in the defect and request backlog. It doesn’t give you results in dollars, but can show the experience that other customers have had. Look at the backlog of direct customer requests, and defects from any source. If there is more than two years of work there, be wary and dig deeper.

Another pocket of expense to explore is your cost of implementation. In addition to any services and support contracts from the vendor, you should ask the expected direct cost of implementation and maintenance that you should expect to perform yourself. I think you can add that to the other costs and make sure the 5 year total isn’t over 5X the original license price.

By: Israel Gat

Israel Gat — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:10:59 +0000

In response to an inquiry from a reader: The post does not explicitly address the perpetual licence model mindset. Nor does it get into the licensing revolution started by open source (see Open Source Software and Agile Software Development: Parallels and Lessons for Enterprise IT). These topics will be addressed in follow-on posts. Israel