2009/7/12 Chris Craddock <[email protected]>: > Pick just about > any piece of non-core business processing (i.e. stuff other than what your > company does to make a living) and you will find the same thing. A whole > slew of outsiders willing to solve the problem for a buck and a half less > than you can do it yourself. "Building your own" is pretty much guaranteed > to take longer, cost more and be less reliable than buying it from somebody > else who does it for a living. The outside providers get to leverage their > work across multiple customers so their costs are lower, their quality and > profits higher. That's why everyone and their third cousin uses packaged > software now. That trend is only ever going to accelerate.
I'm sure you are right. But the piece that puzzles me is that there seem to be so many companies whose core business is really just moving bytes from place to place, who nonetheless think outsourcing is a Good Idea. I'm speaking most obviously of banks, but pretty much all financial services businesses, insurance, and so on are in the same place. Sure, it doesn't make sense for each bank to write their own operating system, web browser, etc. etc., but the actual applications *are* the core of their business. What they can and typically do [try to] outsource is precisely the things that benefit least from leveraging work across multiple customers, i.e. operations and helpdesk. Curious... Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
