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I work at a Fortune 100 and we use fairly well known warehousing database. I can tell you we spend a serious amount of money for our licenses, infrastructure, e

by rubyfan 11y ago

I work at a Fortune 100 and we use fairly well known warehousing database. I can tell you we spend a serious amount of money for our licenses, infrastructure, employee talent, staff-aug contractors and management overhead running this commercial solution. Much of the human resource I would classify as over compensated and non-productive. We also use some of the previously mentioned visualization technologies and get generally poor results by all measures. If AirBNB has a few engineers around who are part of solving a unique challenge AirBNB has, then they are probably getting a better deal than we are. I'd wager their productivity per resource is significantly better, not to mention licensing, infrastructure and control over product features. That said, not everyone is AirBNB and has the ability to attract and retain that type of talent.

timr 11y ago
But what's the alternative? Write your own warehousing database? Likely not. Even AirBnB hasn't done that. I'm not saying that you wouldn't choose a good open source alternative if it exists. I'm saying that you shouldn't run off and implement something that exists commercially if your only reason is that the commercial thing costs money.
- rubyfan 11y ago
  Yeah build our own isn't a good option for us for a few reasons. 1. Our problem set is not novel, we're more or less like many others out there and collectively we are a market that a vendor can build a product for 2. Since we have significantly more revenue than a startup like AirBNB we can rationalize and amortize an ongoing expense 3. We actively try not to do things that aren't our core competency 4. Even if we wanted to we have plenty of human resources but not the talent to build our own analytic DB or data visualization tools I think AirBNB is likely a much different company than most. Their approach to talent attraction/retention, novelty of problem set, ability and tolerance to make a multimillion dollar capital investment in analytic database and visualization tools, etc, etc. In their case the upstart cost of building a custom thing and the value prop likely makes sense.

by rubyfan 11y ago

timr 11y ago

But what's the alternative? Write your own warehousing database? Likely not. Even AirBnB hasn't done that. I'm not saying that you wouldn't choose a good open source alternative if it exists. I'm saying that you shouldn't run off and implement something that exists commercially if your only reason is that the commercial thing costs money.

rubyfan 11y ago
Yeah build our own isn't a good option for us for a few reasons. 1. Our problem set is not novel, we're more or less like many others out there and collectively we are a market that a vendor can build a product for 2. Since we have significantly more revenue than a startup like AirBNB we can rationalize and amortize an ongoing expense 3. We actively try not to do things that aren't our core competency 4. Even if we wanted to we have plenty of human resources but not the talent to build our own analytic DB or data visualization tools I think AirBNB is likely a much different company than most. Their approach to talent attraction/retention, novelty of problem set, ability and tolerance to make a multimillion dollar capital investment in analytic database and visualization tools, etc, etc. In their case the upstart cost of building a custom thing and the value prop likely makes sense.