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Business Software Needs A Revolution
An anonymous reader writes "According to a Businessweek Online article, today's high-end business software is bloated, buggy, and too expensive - no surprise to those of us who have paid our bills by adding pointless features to some piece of software arbitrarily priced at $100k. Evidently, firms are now re-evaluating their software purchases, and finding that they're not working out the way the sales guys told them they would."
To be honest, at least 50-90% of the cost of big software packages goes into maintaining another company, paying that company's CEOs and sales staff, paying for first level support people to misdirect your call and other things that are, to a great degree, unrelated to the quality of the software you're getting.
Think about it: for $100k, you can get package X, which does half of what you need it to do in some areas and twice what you want it to do in others. Or, you can hire me & my buddy Josh for a year. We'll write you a custom piece of software integrating open source tools, work right along with your employees and give you all the code and a support contract for XxX hours over the next YyY years.
If there's an OSS package that already does most of what you need, you can probably hire their developers to customize it for you quickly and at a very minimum expense. You don't even have to tell anybody about your custom code, unless you intend to release the binaries outside your company.
And of course, if you can get three companies that need a similar piece of software, you can invest in a small business that does exactly what you want and split the cost. That's how my friend's firm works...the bills are paid for by the big guys, and anything they sell on top of it is a bonus. As a result, their rates are 1/2 to 1/10th those of their pay-for-our-big-name-CEO competitors.
That's your software revolution: customization, adaptation and competent small businessmen. And it's already happening.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I work at a pretty large .com, one who actually survived the bust and maintains a profit, and has a pretty significant amount of traffic. We have used ATG Dynamo for our application server for several years, partially based upon the built-in ability it has to do an MVC architecture, personalization, pools, and so forth.
However, we just completed a web application that was built using many open source components, including Struts, Validator, JUnit, and others. By using open source components we have completely divorced ourselves from using the proprietary technologies used by Dynamo, and have opened ourselves up to the possibility of using a different, and of course cheaper, application server. This would not have been possible were it not for stable, performant open soruce initiatives.
Not only is management happy because we have (potentially) saved a bunch of money, but the developers are happy because they are much more friendly towards open source than closed technologies; it is far easier to get an answer to a question via Google than it is to pay for and go through the hassle of using a support contract of some kind.
I do not mean to denegrate Dynamo at all, because it is actually a fairly good application server. The licensing costs, however, just cannot be justified when so much of the functionality provided by it is already available elsewhere, for free.