On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Neil Neely <[email protected]> wrote:
> #3) Finding things that have really high annual costs and seeing if > there is a different way to do them (get rid of it, go FOSS, etc) One of the things you need to pay attention to when going from a commercial product to a FOSS one is the ROI on it. There are some cases we've encountered that, at first glance, sounded like great ideas with regards to the cost of licensing and annual support. Where it really began breaking down was when we started paying attention to how much of that cost shifted to internal resources. Specifically, if it took us one FTE to provide support for a service (when we also had vendor support agreements), it often times doubled and tripled (if not more) the number of FTEs to go FOSS. There's lots of things to consider including the development time to bring up that FOSS service, transition efforts, training your customers, training the people supporting it, and so on. With a lot of FOSS stuff, you're talking about a significant investment in time to get someone fluent in the package because there generally won't be a training course you can just take to come up to speed. Don't get me wrong. FOSS is great. I'm just an advocate of the right tool for the right job, even in lean times. I think the bigger win is looking at what tools you're using today and seeing where there are overlaps or duplications in effort and getting rid of those. Why do the same thing twice? Travis (... who is figuring out how to consolidate 10+ monitoring tools all of which overlap with each other in some way, shape, or form) -- Travis Campbell [email protected] _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
