4 ms·

Now imagine you save $10M a year doing it

by collingreen 10mo ago

jt2190 10mo ago
Why would any Enterprise Software vendor leave $10M on the table?
- boringg 10mo ago
  Lack of capability, mismanagement, misinformation to name a few
- esafak 10mo ago
  Because vendors are not fungible in the eyes of the buyer.
- arjie 10mo ago
  Just not that straightforward in practice. You have all of these product lines that people are building that you're hoping will grow the business. They all depend on your backend stuff that's just an implementation detail. You have to somehow convince everyone across the org to stall their product development to perform a "migrate to Postgres" thing? It's not going to be easy. There was a recent big company that posted on Twitter about "shutting down our last Oracle server" and that was the last thing in a multi-year process or something like that. Coordination is sometimes harder than the technology itself.
  - jt2190 10mo ago
    The assertion was that switching vendors would save $10M. I asked why the new vendor would forego $10M that the old vendor was able to collect. Are you saying that the new vendor has to offer this discount otherwise there’s no incentive to migrate? (I agree that migrating is very difficult politically.)
    - arjie 10mo ago
      So you did, I did not pick up that you meant peer vendors which is pretty obvious on re-reading. I believed you were saying that Enterprise Vendors (who are often Oracle customers) would jump to save $10m. But that wasn't what your question was.
sharpy 10mo ago
Once upon a time, our team was paying Oracle $6 million a year in DB licenses alone. We ended up building our own bespoke storage solution.
Invictus0 10mo ago
Now imagine the switch is going to cost you $100M in downtime and change consultants, if it succeeds at all, and your new provider will up the price in a few years time anyway.
- PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  Then just don't migrate to MS SQL but to Postgres
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 10mo ago
    Big enterprise businesses want support contracts for someone to blame. Yes, you can find Postgres support, but switching to a different devil is the far more common option.
  - Invictus0 10mo ago
    "just"
0cf8612b2e1e 10mo ago
It’s rarely that clean. Sure, there is the immediate sticker price, but you have to factor in the migration costs as well. Depending on how deep the integration goes, it could take years of effort. All of which is going to take political capital to get people to migrate perfectly working systems without any operational gain. Plus you have the old guard who actively fight you-maybe they have spent their career in Oracle and that is all they know. Even if you do move mountains and make it happen, suddenly any outages after the transition become your fault. “This never happened on the old system.”
mystifyingpoi 10mo ago
True words. I've seen this technique used to force people to think realistically. It goes like this (example): - Is it possible for a 3 person team to manage 1000 distinct Kubernetes clusters? - No way in hell! - What if we hypothetically pay you $2M salary each? - Well, let me think about it, we could figure this out...
- 0cf8612b2e1e 10mo ago
  How is that realistic? If you offer me insane money, I will of course bluster that I can do the impossible. When I inevitably fail, I still have a pocket full of cash.
  - chasd00 10mo ago
    It's not realistic, money doesn't make hard things easy. Paying someone more doesn't make them more capable, at best it an incentive to work longer/harder. That doesn't make them more capable either, it just makes them work more. If someone asked me to swim the English Channel I'd say no because i can't do it. If someone offered me $2M to do it i would still say no. Let's say i said "yes, i'll figure something out.", well i would still drown or need to be rescued even after being paid $2m.
  - tracerbulletx 10mo ago
    Just write Kubernetes for Kubernetes to manage the kubernetes. duh That's a joke. but unironically you could manage 1000 Kubernetes clusters with automation. why not?
    - Lapsa 10mo ago
      use ChatGPT for Kubernetes
    - mystifyingpoi 10mo ago
      You are right, that's exactly my point. I was in such situation multiple times. People will say "it's impossible" but they actually mean "it's impossible given my motivation connected to money, time I could be given, freedom to experiment without boss looking at the calendar, and probably a bunch of other things". When the same people are given sudden motivation kick (even as a hypothetical) they start to actually think. Maybe they'll figure out that it's impossible anyway and won't do it for a $100M. Myself, I'd immediately start to think how to do it.
mystifyingpoi 10mo ago
It's not really going to benefit ME anything. It will benefit my employer this amount. I might get an extra bonus for successful migration, but it's peanuts compared to the savings. So in such situation, I'd be tempted to actively oppose this initiative.
chasd00 10mo ago
> Now imagine you save $10M a year doing it only after the move is complete and assuming it's as successful as you think it would be. What usually happens is the migration takes on a life of its own and is a multi-year if not multi-decade project. It sucks up so much money and effort that a business could be using to actually build their business vs migration to a different database. Meanwhile, the account execs of the old system know you're moving off of it so say good bye to any kind of contract discounts or special treatment during emergencies. There's entire graveyards of failed enterprise system migrations. The most likely outcome is eventually a compromise has to be made and now you have two systems to maintain and license, the legacy one, and the new one. With the promise of eventually getting off the old one but it never happens. I'm on a project with a client that has 24 ERPs across their enterprise around the globe from acquisitions. Half of them are ERPs that were meant to replace another one but the transition was never completed. A big part of this project is integrating all of their sales pipelines, analytics, and history into, yet another, enterprise system.
- collingreen 10mo ago
  That's absolutely true. Is also true for most projects in general though so pretty standard.
crackez 10mo ago
That's about how much it cost my company to move the flagship off of z/OS. That kept the language (Cobol) and DB2 intact (moved to DB2LUW); just a new build target basically. It took like 5 or 6 years and that $10M represents the cost of only 10 months of operations on Z.
pfortuny 10mo ago
Imagine you think you save… You only save after you have paid…
prepend 10mo ago
Now imagine you risk breaking $100M in order to save $10M.

Now imagine you save $10M a year doing it

jt2190 10mo ago

Why would any Enterprise Software vendor leave $10M on the table?

boringg 10mo ago
Lack of capability, mismanagement, misinformation to name a few
esafak 10mo ago
Because vendors are not fungible in the eyes of the buyer.
arjie 10mo ago
Just not that straightforward in practice. You have all of these product lines that people are building that you're hoping will grow the business. They all depend on your backend stuff that's just an implementation detail. You have to somehow convince everyone across the org to stall their product development to perform a "migrate to Postgres" thing? It's not going to be easy. There was a recent big company that posted on Twitter about "shutting down our last Oracle server" and that was the last thing in a multi-year process or something like that. Coordination is sometimes harder than the technology itself.
- jt2190 10mo ago
  The assertion was that switching vendors would save $10M. I asked why the new vendor would forego $10M that the old vendor was able to collect. Are you saying that the new vendor has to offer this discount otherwise there’s no incentive to migrate? (I agree that migrating is very difficult politically.)
  - arjie 10mo ago
    So you did, I did not pick up that you meant peer vendors which is pretty obvious on re-reading. I believed you were saying that Enterprise Vendors (who are often Oracle customers) would jump to save $10m. But that wasn't what your question was.

sharpy 10mo ago

Once upon a time, our team was paying Oracle $6 million a year in DB licenses alone. We ended up building our own bespoke storage solution.

Invictus0 10mo ago

Now imagine the switch is going to cost you $100M in downtime and change consultants, if it succeeds at all, and your new provider will up the price in a few years time anyway.

PunchyHamster 10mo ago
Then just don't migrate to MS SQL but to Postgres
- 0cf8612b2e1e 10mo ago
  Big enterprise businesses want support contracts for someone to blame. Yes, you can find Postgres support, but switching to a different devil is the far more common option.
- Invictus0 10mo ago
  "just"

0cf8612b2e1e 10mo ago

It’s rarely that clean. Sure, there is the immediate sticker price, but you have to factor in the migration costs as well. Depending on how deep the integration goes, it could take years of effort. All of which is going to take political capital to get people to migrate perfectly working systems without any operational gain. Plus you have the old guard who actively fight you-maybe they have spent their career in Oracle and that is all they know. Even if you do move mountains and make it happen, suddenly any outages after the transition become your fault. “This never happened on the old system.”

mystifyingpoi 10mo ago

True words. I've seen this technique used to force people to think realistically. It goes like this (example): - Is it possible for a 3 person team to manage 1000 distinct Kubernetes clusters? - No way in hell! - What if we hypothetically pay you $2M salary each? - Well, let me think about it, we could figure this out...

0cf8612b2e1e 10mo ago
How is that realistic? If you offer me insane money, I will of course bluster that I can do the impossible. When I inevitably fail, I still have a pocket full of cash.
- chasd00 10mo ago
  It's not realistic, money doesn't make hard things easy. Paying someone more doesn't make them more capable, at best it an incentive to work longer/harder. That doesn't make them more capable either, it just makes them work more. If someone asked me to swim the English Channel I'd say no because i can't do it. If someone offered me $2M to do it i would still say no. Let's say i said "yes, i'll figure something out.", well i would still drown or need to be rescued even after being paid $2m.
- tracerbulletx 10mo ago
  Just write Kubernetes for Kubernetes to manage the kubernetes. duh That's a joke. but unironically you could manage 1000 Kubernetes clusters with automation. why not?
  - Lapsa 10mo ago
    use ChatGPT for Kubernetes
  - mystifyingpoi 10mo ago
    You are right, that's exactly my point. I was in such situation multiple times. People will say "it's impossible" but they actually mean "it's impossible given my motivation connected to money, time I could be given, freedom to experiment without boss looking at the calendar, and probably a bunch of other things". When the same people are given sudden motivation kick (even as a hypothetical) they start to actually think. Maybe they'll figure out that it's impossible anyway and won't do it for a $100M. Myself, I'd immediately start to think how to do it.

mystifyingpoi 10mo ago

It's not really going to benefit ME anything. It will benefit my employer this amount. I might get an extra bonus for successful migration, but it's peanuts compared to the savings. So in such situation, I'd be tempted to actively oppose this initiative.

chasd00 10mo ago

> Now imagine you save $10M a year doing it only after the move is complete and assuming it's as successful as you think it would be. What usually happens is the migration takes on a life of its own and is a multi-year if not multi-decade project. It sucks up so much money and effort that a business could be using to actually build their business vs migration to a different database. Meanwhile, the account execs of the old system know you're moving off of it so say good bye to any kind of contract discounts or special treatment during emergencies. There's entire graveyards of failed enterprise system migrations. The most likely outcome is eventually a compromise has to be made and now you have two systems to maintain and license, the legacy one, and the new one. With the promise of eventually getting off the old one but it never happens. I'm on a project with a client that has 24 ERPs across their enterprise around the globe from acquisitions. Half of them are ERPs that were meant to replace another one but the transition was never completed. A big part of this project is integrating all of their sales pipelines, analytics, and history into, yet another, enterprise system.

collingreen 10mo ago
That's absolutely true. Is also true for most projects in general though so pretty standard.

crackez 10mo ago

That's about how much it cost my company to move the flagship off of z/OS. That kept the language (Cobol) and DB2 intact (moved to DB2LUW); just a new build target basically. It took like 5 or 6 years and that $10M represents the cost of only 10 months of operations on Z.

pfortuny 10mo ago

Imagine you think you save… You only save after you have paid…

prepend 10mo ago

Now imagine you risk breaking $100M in order to save $10M.