8 ms·

Just for a second, imagine a company that isn't a software company, but needs software to run its business. Think manufacturing, logistics, shipping, constructi

by ghc 4y ago

Just for a second, imagine a company that isn't a software company, but needs software to run its business. Think manufacturing, logistics, shipping, construction, food (industrial scale egg production, for example) etc. There's a lot of companies like that out there...in fact it's almost all of them. Those companies run all their boring, essential software (accounting, ERPs, etc.) on VMWare, Oracle, Azure, etc. Since software isn't their core business, they pay an external company to keep their software running. Like it or not, cloud providers are for software companies, and most companies have no interest in becoming a software company. They might have some small groups that do analytics or software in-house, and those groups might use cloud providers, but all the essential software will be run by a company you can call when something breaks, or if you're big enough embeds some staff in your office. It's just good sense to outsource non-core functions. Software companies outsource hosting and datacenter stuff to AWS, etc. Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly?

nousermane 4y ago
Exactly. Most "enterprise" software competes with a team of 3 doing it all in excel. At this rate, $100k/yr is a bargain.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  When people talk enterprise they are talking 2000+ person companies. They are not doing their ERP payroll etc using excel.
- FredPret 4y ago
  I do ERP and the thought of replicating it in Excel… yikes. For a big company you’ll need a team of hundreds and a huge surplus of sanity, and you’ll still have a worse outcome. An ERP is basically a database with an interface with business logic built in. Certainly not something you want to do in Excel.
JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness, like AWS. This is how I feel about most B2B companies and software. I wonder how a recession and the end of free funny money will change that whole sector?
- jjice 4y ago
  > Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness I pay a barber to cut my hair. Sure, I could learn how to cut my own hair, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up. I pay a mechanic to fix my car for serious repair. Sure, I could learn how to replace a transmission, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up. If these (and the endless examples of paying professionals) are a tax for stupidity and laziness, then everyone is lazy and stupid. If you're not a software company, there's a good chance it's worth it to save the time to pay someone to set it up for you. Also, if Joe's Fish Market wants a POS system and needs a server for it and he decides to set it up himself, if he gets it up and running, what are the chances it'll stay up to day and not have a firewall issue? Probably pretty low compared to if a professional did it. Joe wants to focus on selling fish. That's where he's a pro. I don't know anything about fish, but I could set up a server for him. We all have our own skills, and it's often worth while to leverage other people's skills, because they'll do it faster, better, and it will likely end up cheaper after time and security are taken into consideration.
  - yobbo 4y ago
    > I pay a barber to cut my hair. Meaningless analogy. Here some other meaningless analogies: Why would anyone ever own a frying pan? Not only do you need to rent a stove, you also need to hire a chef to cook with frying pan, you need a station with chefs that prep ingredients and so on. Just go to a restaurant. You pay a mechanic to fix your car? Why would anyone ever own a car when you can rent a car whenever you need one. You pay a barber to cut your hair? Why not just wear a wig! And so on ...
    - jnovek 4y ago
      I lease a car every four years in part so that I don’t have to deal with the inevitable car repairs that come after that point. For some — but not all — people, that’s a preferable option. For some — but not all — companies, enterprise tech is a preferable option.
      - 4y ago
tnel77 4y ago
Because Linux is fun! /s
squarefoot 4y ago
> Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly? Not just Linux but IT in general. It may have to be about security; my impression is that at least some of the widespread successful attacks in recent years might have been prevented if non IT companies had their own IT department, servers and in house security teams. Relying on an external provider is cheap and comfortable, until the day a single vulnerability screws all its customers data in a single day.
- hnarn 4y ago
  > if non IT companies had their own IT department I think you vastly underestimate the cost of on-prem IT, especially for small and medium sized businesses. The "floor" cost of your own IT is many, many orders of magnitude higher than a subscription to something like Office 365 for something like 50 people. "Normal" people don't use cloud services because they're lazy, they do it because the economics of rolling your own IT does not make sense, and hasn't since the days when it stopped being your only option.
- mfer 4y ago
  Having your own It department doesn't mean you'll be fine for security. Plenty of health systems have their own IT department and have been hit. But, even thinking of health care systems is thinking of big businesses. How does a road construction company justify an IT department or security team? Think of businesses like that. They have have an IT guy who manages services they use and is an expert at using those. Most businesses are small to medium in size and non-tech.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  I work in this area and it’s the opposite. Small businesses with in house It get hacked waaaaasy more.
nimbius 4y ago
but thats just it, this argument only ever works if you dont care about performance or features and believe the marketing. You make eggs, and your target fixation only allows you to see eggs, so these companies hold some mysterious value to you. KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare and handles migrations snapshots imports and exports without additional byzantine license agreements or mandatory minimums for hardware support on network switches and servers. Cockpit makes it dead simple to run. Oracle performance is so awful the license terms do not allow you to release performance benchmarks or comparative analysis against other databases. it also has all the same heavy lifting you need to focus on for things like galera clusters or postgres, so theres no clear win unless you like paying Larry for the privilege of slow transactionals on a hyperconverged iron beast, or youre too lazy to figure out ODBC. And Symantec so openly hates their customers they now bundle a cryptominer with their software. before that their incompetence was so blinding Google had to step in and force them to give up their CA business. "enterprise" software is an absurd proposition for anyone smart enough to realize their business is more than just the end product. to everyone else, these companies are borderline predatory.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >if you dont care about performance or features and believe the marketing I don't except to the degree that the product is more or less suitable for my business needs. And note I said product, which KVM by itself is not. If I'm going to use KVM--and, yes, I likely would rather than VMware unless I otherwise needed VMware for some reason--I'd be buying it as part of a supported commercial Linux distribution.
- amenod 4y ago
  I agree with you - and you are still missing the point. The enterprises are buying a service. They don't care that it is running on AHWRGGG instead of TLMWBBB (which is soooo much better). What they care about is that it runs, and when it doesn't, that someone fixes it. This is it. Could you run everything on PostgreSQL instead of Oracle? Yes, take a look at EnterpriseDB. I guess Oracle just sells better? (guessing here, no idea) The money is of course important, but these providers are smart. They take only what they can and not more. Which is still big money. And while Oracle & co. would never make it into any company I can make a decision for, I don't think that keeps them awake at night - there are enough (big!) fish in the ocean.
yobbo 4y ago
> but needs software to run its business In this case, they have no need for VMWare or Oracle. Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to, which allows them to float through their careers fairly unchallenged. At one point in time, IBM had this market position. Then Microsoft, Oracle, and now Amazon and Google.
- hnarn 4y ago
  > Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to Or maybe, just maybe, really big corporations that make software solutions are often really big because their solutions are, if not feature-wise the absolute best, by far the most stable and reliable? If one were to buy your argument, that would be like saying that businesses buying the Google Apps suite is nonsensical, because the only reason you'd ever use Google is because you're a "careerist" that "only know" Google. That's obviously not true, Gmail and the rest of the Google suite have been market-leading for many years, because they are good solutions that solve real problems. Presumably the same thing goes for the Microsoft Office suite, and so on.
  - yobbo 4y ago
    People are now starting careers as Office 365 "officers". From now until retirement, they will champion Office 365 and its successors in all situations, because in effect they will be championing their own CVs. Just like people did with IBM, Oracle, J2EE, and so on. If at one point Google Apps is superior to Office 365 makes no difference. The insight is that the careerists are the effective insider salesmen of enterprise software. Not specs, benchmarks, stats or anything like that.
    - hnarn 4y ago
      Why can’t multiple things be true at the same time? The idea of product “officers” can be bizarre and counter productive, while that product simultaneously can be one of the best in the market. I’m not saying that O365 is great, I use it at work and I hate it, but enterprise software has always been like this: it’s not enough to be better, you need to be something like 3x better, but if you are it doesn’t matter if you’re going up against Microsoft. Software is a lot more competitive in that way than a lot of other industries.
indymike 4y ago
> Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly? Um... perhaps because it is less costly and will lead to better capabilities, more reliability, less complexity than burying it under 18 layers of apis, containers, and virtual machines.
- adrr 4y ago
  If you think there is efficiency gains in terms of cost savings. Why don't you do a startup to try to go after the enterprise software market? We spend millions on ERP, PLM, SCM,WMS, etc. We would gladly move to cheaper solutions that offered the same feature sets. I don't have choice about VMWare because a bunch of software requires on-prem hosting due to latency(need sub 10ms for sensors) and the software is built on top of windows.
- noizejoy 4y ago
  > … perhaps because it is less costly and will lead to better capabilities, more reliability, less complexity than burying it under 18 layers of apis, containers, and virtual machines. Over the years, I’ve come to suspect that maybe the technology is less of a differentiator in the overall effectiveness of a company’s IT environment than the people running it. And with IT staffing supply having lagged behind demand (as also evidenced by relatively high salaries in IT vs many other professions), you could easily argue that it was (still is?) historically more difficult to hire good IT people than in many other professions. And arguably that’s making outsourcing of IT needs relatively more attractive than outsourcing of other business functions where reasonably competent leadership and staffing is easier to come by. And arguably, capturing many of the benefits of Open Source require more IT competency than using off the shelf mainstream commercial software. If I’m using the same crap that everyone of my competitors is using, none of us win or lose on that. But when using Open Source, I’m more likely to depend on the quality of my IT leadership and staff to outcompete my competitors. And unless a CEO is quite IT literate, s/he probably doesn’t want that additional headache of becoming good at figuring out how to hire good IT leadership. So I’d hazard a guess, that insourcing and the use of Open Source will become more attractive for many corporations only if/when IT salaries drop more in line with other professions.
unabridged 4y ago
Nontech companies are only using spreadsheets, forms, and storage. But they spend their technical manpower on implementing business logic in closed source locked-in expensive software. I don't think its much more work just to implement the business logic in excel/google sheets and serverless functions, and end up with something much much cheaper and much more portable.

by ghc 4y ago

nousermane 4y ago

Exactly. Most "enterprise" software competes with a team of 3 doing it all in excel. At this rate, $100k/yr is a bargain.

foobiekr 4y ago
When people talk enterprise they are talking 2000+ person companies. They are not doing their ERP payroll etc using excel.
FredPret 4y ago
I do ERP and the thought of replicating it in Excel… yikes. For a big company you’ll need a team of hundreds and a huge surplus of sanity, and you’ll still have a worse outcome. An ERP is basically a database with an interface with business logic built in. Certainly not something you want to do in Excel.

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago

Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness, like AWS. This is how I feel about most B2B companies and software. I wonder how a recession and the end of free funny money will change that whole sector?

jjice 4y ago
> Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness I pay a barber to cut my hair. Sure, I could learn how to cut my own hair, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up. I pay a mechanic to fix my car for serious repair. Sure, I could learn how to replace a transmission, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up. If these (and the endless examples of paying professionals) are a tax for stupidity and laziness, then everyone is lazy and stupid. If you're not a software company, there's a good chance it's worth it to save the time to pay someone to set it up for you. Also, if Joe's Fish Market wants a POS system and needs a server for it and he decides to set it up himself, if he gets it up and running, what are the chances it'll stay up to day and not have a firewall issue? Probably pretty low compared to if a professional did it. Joe wants to focus on selling fish. That's where he's a pro. I don't know anything about fish, but I could set up a server for him. We all have our own skills, and it's often worth while to leverage other people's skills, because they'll do it faster, better, and it will likely end up cheaper after time and security are taken into consideration.
- yobbo 4y ago
  > I pay a barber to cut my hair. Meaningless analogy. Here some other meaningless analogies: Why would anyone ever own a frying pan? Not only do you need to rent a stove, you also need to hire a chef to cook with frying pan, you need a station with chefs that prep ingredients and so on. Just go to a restaurant. You pay a mechanic to fix your car? Why would anyone ever own a car when you can rent a car whenever you need one. You pay a barber to cut your hair? Why not just wear a wig! And so on ...
  - jnovek 4y ago
    I lease a car every four years in part so that I don’t have to deal with the inevitable car repairs that come after that point. For some — but not all — people, that’s a preferable option. For some — but not all — companies, enterprise tech is a preferable option.
    - 4y ago

tnel77 4y ago

Because Linux is fun! /s

squarefoot 4y ago

> Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly? Not just Linux but IT in general. It may have to be about security; my impression is that at least some of the widespread successful attacks in recent years might have been prevented if non IT companies had their own IT department, servers and in house security teams. Relying on an external provider is cheap and comfortable, until the day a single vulnerability screws all its customers data in a single day.

hnarn 4y ago
> if non IT companies had their own IT department I think you vastly underestimate the cost of on-prem IT, especially for small and medium sized businesses. The "floor" cost of your own IT is many, many orders of magnitude higher than a subscription to something like Office 365 for something like 50 people. "Normal" people don't use cloud services because they're lazy, they do it because the economics of rolling your own IT does not make sense, and hasn't since the days when it stopped being your only option.
mfer 4y ago
Having your own It department doesn't mean you'll be fine for security. Plenty of health systems have their own IT department and have been hit. But, even thinking of health care systems is thinking of big businesses. How does a road construction company justify an IT department or security team? Think of businesses like that. They have have an IT guy who manages services they use and is an expert at using those. Most businesses are small to medium in size and non-tech.
imwillofficial 4y ago
I work in this area and it’s the opposite. Small businesses with in house It get hacked waaaaasy more.

nimbius 4y ago

but thats just it, this argument only ever works if you dont care about performance or features and believe the marketing. You make eggs, and your target fixation only allows you to see eggs, so these companies hold some mysterious value to you. KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare and handles migrations snapshots imports and exports without additional byzantine license agreements or mandatory minimums for hardware support on network switches and servers. Cockpit makes it dead simple to run. Oracle performance is so awful the license terms do not allow you to release performance benchmarks or comparative analysis against other databases. it also has all the same heavy lifting you need to focus on for things like galera clusters or postgres, so theres no clear win unless you like paying Larry for the privilege of slow transactionals on a hyperconverged iron beast, or youre too lazy to figure out ODBC. And Symantec so openly hates their customers they now bundle a cryptominer with their software. before that their incompetence was so blinding Google had to step in and force them to give up their CA business. "enterprise" software is an absurd proposition for anyone smart enough to realize their business is more than just the end product. to everyone else, these companies are borderline predatory.

ghaff 4y ago
>if you dont care about performance or features and believe the marketing I don't except to the degree that the product is more or less suitable for my business needs. And note I said product, which KVM by itself is not. If I'm going to use KVM--and, yes, I likely would rather than VMware unless I otherwise needed VMware for some reason--I'd be buying it as part of a supported commercial Linux distribution.
amenod 4y ago
I agree with you - and you are still missing the point. The enterprises are buying a service. They don't care that it is running on AHWRGGG instead of TLMWBBB (which is soooo much better). What they care about is that it runs, and when it doesn't, that someone fixes it. This is it. Could you run everything on PostgreSQL instead of Oracle? Yes, take a look at EnterpriseDB. I guess Oracle just sells better? (guessing here, no idea) The money is of course important, but these providers are smart. They take only what they can and not more. Which is still big money. And while Oracle & co. would never make it into any company I can make a decision for, I don't think that keeps them awake at night - there are enough (big!) fish in the ocean.

yobbo 4y ago

> but needs software to run its business In this case, they have no need for VMWare or Oracle. Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to, which allows them to float through their careers fairly unchallenged. At one point in time, IBM had this market position. Then Microsoft, Oracle, and now Amazon and Google.

hnarn 4y ago
> Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to Or maybe, just maybe, really big corporations that make software solutions are often really big because their solutions are, if not feature-wise the absolute best, by far the most stable and reliable? If one were to buy your argument, that would be like saying that businesses buying the Google Apps suite is nonsensical, because the only reason you'd ever use Google is because you're a "careerist" that "only know" Google. That's obviously not true, Gmail and the rest of the Google suite have been market-leading for many years, because they are good solutions that solve real problems. Presumably the same thing goes for the Microsoft Office suite, and so on.
- yobbo 4y ago
  People are now starting careers as Office 365 "officers". From now until retirement, they will champion Office 365 and its successors in all situations, because in effect they will be championing their own CVs. Just like people did with IBM, Oracle, J2EE, and so on. If at one point Google Apps is superior to Office 365 makes no difference. The insight is that the careerists are the effective insider salesmen of enterprise software. Not specs, benchmarks, stats or anything like that.
  - hnarn 4y ago
    Why can’t multiple things be true at the same time? The idea of product “officers” can be bizarre and counter productive, while that product simultaneously can be one of the best in the market. I’m not saying that O365 is great, I use it at work and I hate it, but enterprise software has always been like this: it’s not enough to be better, you need to be something like 3x better, but if you are it doesn’t matter if you’re going up against Microsoft. Software is a lot more competitive in that way than a lot of other industries.

indymike 4y ago

> Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly? Um... perhaps because it is less costly and will lead to better capabilities, more reliability, less complexity than burying it under 18 layers of apis, containers, and virtual machines.

adrr 4y ago
If you think there is efficiency gains in terms of cost savings. Why don't you do a startup to try to go after the enterprise software market? We spend millions on ERP, PLM, SCM,WMS, etc. We would gladly move to cheaper solutions that offered the same feature sets. I don't have choice about VMWare because a bunch of software requires on-prem hosting due to latency(need sub 10ms for sensors) and the software is built on top of windows.
noizejoy 4y ago
> … perhaps because it is less costly and will lead to better capabilities, more reliability, less complexity than burying it under 18 layers of apis, containers, and virtual machines. Over the years, I’ve come to suspect that maybe the technology is less of a differentiator in the overall effectiveness of a company’s IT environment than the people running it. And with IT staffing supply having lagged behind demand (as also evidenced by relatively high salaries in IT vs many other professions), you could easily argue that it was (still is?) historically more difficult to hire good IT people than in many other professions. And arguably that’s making outsourcing of IT needs relatively more attractive than outsourcing of other business functions where reasonably competent leadership and staffing is easier to come by. And arguably, capturing many of the benefits of Open Source require more IT competency than using off the shelf mainstream commercial software. If I’m using the same crap that everyone of my competitors is using, none of us win or lose on that. But when using Open Source, I’m more likely to depend on the quality of my IT leadership and staff to outcompete my competitors. And unless a CEO is quite IT literate, s/he probably doesn’t want that additional headache of becoming good at figuring out how to hire good IT leadership. So I’d hazard a guess, that insourcing and the use of Open Source will become more attractive for many corporations only if/when IT salaries drop more in line with other professions.

unabridged 4y ago

Nontech companies are only using spreadsheets, forms, and storage. But they spend their technical manpower on implementing business logic in closed source locked-in expensive software. I don't think its much more work just to implement the business logic in excel/google sheets and serverless functions, and end up with something much much cheaper and much more portable.