Hello,
On 2/18/2011 7:51 AM, rob@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Yes, if you dropped maintenance on vendor packages as a shortsighted goal
of saving money you will now look like the first syllable of assume.
Vendor packages were a *HUGE* issue for us, and we did not drop
maintenance on any of them, thank you very much.
Just finding the opportunity to install updates to vendor software is a
MAJOR pain. Our packages (many of them, at any rate) are in /constant/
production use, and we've written custom software that works tightly
with them. Upgrading them means working on a Sunday (the only day of
the week when production isn't running), installing the updates, testing
all of our custom software, making changes to custom software if
required, and then testing the equipment in production to make sure it
still works as expected with the custom software. It's hard to get one
update done in a single day.
One of our vendors, when we asked for the upgrade in November, had not
even heard that there was a 7.1. They said "do you mean 6.1? I don't
think there's a 7.1?" We had to wait months for a 7.1 update. When
they finally gave it to us, we discovered that it wasn't just one update
we had to make, it was 3... we have to update to three new releases to
get up to the current one.
I keep myself very busy. Every day of the week, I work until 8pm, go
home and relax for 2 hours, then go back to work on articles, et al. On
the weekends, I'm usually working on articles or presentations, and I'm
up against a deadline almost every week.
Giving up not one, but *MANY* Sundays to get all the vendors software
upgraded is *EXTREMELY* painful for me.
It has nothing to do with not keeping up on maintenance, or how long
object conversion takes. I could care less about the time object
conversion takes -- at least, when we did the CISC->RISC upgrade, the
time for object conversion was miniscule.
However, if you are current with maintenance then the only cost involved
is verifying that you are ready for the upgrade and performing the
upgrade. That's just labor and management will see that as zero cost as
you are probably salary.
And the cost of RDi... We have six developers. So at $865/each for
the first, year, and $300+ each for subsequent years, it's outrageously
expensive. More expensive than Microsoft Visual Studio, by *far*. And
it doesn't even contain the compilers.
So I talk to my boss, and he wants justification. He wants to know what
we're getting for all this work, and all this cost. He points to other
projects, and tells me how important they are, and asks why we aren't
devoting our resources to those instead of an expensive upgrade. What
do I tell him?
midrange.com
