The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main as well.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Ed Philbrook) writes: > Clark et al, > > Depending on the degree of modifications, isn't it a major negative that > mods to a COTS package have to be reapplied or reworked for every upgrade > to the package? re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008d.html#37 COTS software on box ? to replace mainframe was Re: Curious(?) way to ZIP a mainframe file it is all relative ... and/or return-on-investment aka whether overall lower net costs of COTS w/modifications or a wholly developed RYO (roll-your-own) implementation. also there are business opportunity costs ... aka whether the business can better spend the same amount of money someplace else (ROI). for extreme scenario ... a large datacenter (billion or two in mainframe hardware) paid all the engineering and development for a new, significantly better PDU (power distribution unit) ... and then turned it over to a PDU vendor. the business easily justified having a much better PDU ... but couldn't justify actually getting into the PDU business. That PDU is now a staple in large number datacenters. another such example was a large financial institution hired a several experts in complex pattern algorithms and created a sophisticated new fraud detection tool ... and then turned it over to a vendor of fraud detection applications. Again, the business easily justified having much better fraud detection ... but didn't actually justify ongoing development and support ... any competitive business advantage was more than offset by having ongoing support&development amortized acrossed a large number of customers (and because of competitive business issues they wouldn't have been able to easily vend the products to other institutions) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
