CIOs Band Together Against Paying For Software Bugs

gmerideth writes: "This article over at cio.com interviews several CIO's who are sick and tired of spending billions every year on software upgrades simply because the creater tells them to upgrade as they wont support previous versions or they get stuck into lengthy, costly licenses. Quoted from the article "Other companies, such as Ameritrade Holding, are opting for open-source technologies such as the GNU and Linux operating systems, the Apache Web server and Sendmail e-mail.". It's glad to see the open source movement doing it's job."

Not only the upgrades

[Green Aardvark House]

The money that can be saved is not only in upgrades, but virus prevention as well.

The company I worked for wasted thousands of dollars when the Nimda virus struck. To a small business, this cost plus a day's worth of downtime can be a significant hit.

If we used the open-source alternative, we might have saved this money.

Re:Wait a minute. Somebody's shifting blame.

[Wretch1970]

Have you ever tried negotiating with Microsoft or Oracle or Verisign for that matter? I have. It's not much fun for a company with "only" 100m in annual revenue.

Yeah some HUGE companies can do it, but small and medium sized companies are SOL.

Lots of small and medium sized companies would love to get away from fom paying big money to the moonpolists, but they don't have the money to hire new staff to support open source products, or the money to re-train their existing staff.

You have to make a choice to specialize, and lets face there are a lot more readily available support resources for Oracle and Microsoft than for MySQL and Linux.

Bottom line: Most companies aren't capable of supporting the staff to maintain redundant/diversified software.

Re:Sfotware Bugs

[Lumpy]

Please oh please add one more step..

Tight code.

Today it's easy to leave a kludge or do it in-efficently because I have 3098 teraflops or another insane amount of processing power.. so why waste my precious programmer time and make my code tight?

I believe every programmer should be forced to program for embedded systems... where if your code isnt tight, you're fired out of a cannon at a brick wall (man I miss that gerbil commercial)

Tight code that is bug-free is an ultra rarity today. no matter what OS you run.

It's not about the cost of the software...

[rcs1000]

Anyone who has spent $100,000+ on a piece of software knows that is NOT the real cost. What you pay Lawson, Oracle or SAP is a mere fraction of the total cost.

An SAP salesman told me that the ratio of license to total cost was 1:8. That's right, they paid $8 in services (implementation/integration) and customisation for every $1 in licenses.

And that's why 'subscriptions' don't work. So, you pay Oracle a fee each year. Great. Changing the system is still prohibitively expensive because implementing a new system is far more expensive than just paying a new subscription fee.

Nor does open source help. (Much). Software that automates business processes is generally designed by people that work (and know) the relevent industries really well. It is a business not a technical issue. These people generally don't want to share their knowledge with their competitors. Or at least not without stock options .

CIOs and the like need to concentrate on:

(a) Getting software vendors to take some degree of responsibility for systems. (Success fees are a good idea.)

(b) Defining exact needs from the start. How many software projects start with... 'i think i know what i want but i'm sure i'll work it out as the project goes on'?

*r

Re:Do we spend less time maintaining Linux?

[Malcontent]

If you had a big box you could just install everything on that box. Then either mount the partitions or use run everything remotely with X. Choose a stripped down windowing system and it should be fine on a speedy network. When all else fails use apt or any one of a few dozen remote managemnt systems available for linux.