Why is the goal to "knock a lot of cheapo's out of the water"? I've worked at one company where the guiding principal was to make the cheapo work and to save money by having smart people do the integration and support work -- and another company which is paralyzed by its inability to hire anyone decent and which constantly makes the decision to throw 6-figure and 7-figure sums at the non-cheapos with the 24x7 support contracts (and usually where what happens is 6-figures gets dropped on something to get 10%, then finance balks on the 7-figures necessary to deploy to the other 90%)....
Based on my experience, I'll take the smart people + El Cheapo approach... All I see around here is people making the IT decisions based on enterprise-class issues and producing more and more mega-FAILs... For example, we've blown 6-figures on DNS appliances which have never worked correctly -- when all I'd really like to see is NICtool and bind run competently so that we have split-horizon and reverses all work. Throwing money at the appliance didn't solve any of our problems for us -- the same people who couldn't run bind can't run the appliances either, even with support from the vendor. On Sun, 25 Oct 2009, Elizabeth Schwartz wrote: > Esther phrases it very well, and this is a good example. Just saying > "oh, anybody smart goes with Cisco" isn't going to win any converts. > As professionals, we should be able to justify a bias with facts that > explain why a choice contributes to the organization's goals. What's > the MTBF, is there 24x7 technical support, do we know of satisfied > corporate customers at our level... > > I note that while *techie* snobbery is not a good selling point, most > managers will take notice of what their competitors are doing, and > what other similarly sized organizations are doing. If you can find > some numbers showing what other businesses are doing, that'll go a > long way. How does NameBrand's market penetration compare to el > cheapo? Does El Cheapo even *have* a support line? Does El Cheapo have > any satisfied corporate customers our size and are they willing to > share the names as references? Will they put support guarantees in > writing with a clause that costs them money if we experience downtime? > > Just asking for a satisfied large corporate customer will knock a lot > of cheapo's out of the water... > _______________________________________________ > Tech mailing list > [email protected] > http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ > _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
