Red Hat CEO Says Software Vendor Model Is Broken

alphadogg writes "The current model of selling commercial enterprise software is broken, charged the CEO for Red Hat. It is too expensive, doesn't address user needs and, worst of all, it leaves chief information officers holding all the risk of implementing new systems. 'The business models between customer and vendors are fundamentally broken,' said Jim Whitehurst, speaking Wednesday at the Interop conference in New York. 'Vendors have to guess at what [customers] want, and there is a mismatch of what customers want and what they get. Creating feature wars is not what the customer is looking for.' Whitehurst estimated that the total global IT market, not including telecommunications, is about $1.4 trillion a year. Factor in the rough estimates that half of all IT projects fail or are significantly downgraded, and that only half of all features in software packages are actually used, then it would follow that 'easily $500 billion of that $1.4 trillion is fundamentally wasted every year,' he said."

Comments

Re:WHAT vendors?

[h4rr4r]

So then you have never worked with Oracle, SAP, or Symantec, so which vendors are you talking about?

Re:Actively used features

[snowraver1]

Easy, just make a menu item for them and then every time it's clicked, send usage data. That way you can have the worst of both worlds: A convoluted menu system and lack of functionality.

Cloud will kill the model

[Mephistophocles]

Whitehurst touches on the emergence of cloud computing in the enterprise as well, and this is integral to an intelligent discussion of the imminent death of the traditional licensing system of enterprise software. From TFA:

""People say [they are interested in the] cloud but what they are really espousing are frustrations with existing IT business models," Whitehurst said in an interview with IDG News Service after the presentation. Whitehurst kicked off his talk by asking a seemingly simple question: "Why are costs of IT going up when the underlying costs to deliver those services halves every 18 months?" The cost of computing should come down, he reasoned, thanks to improving processing speeds and storage capacities. New, more powerful development tools and frameworks should also ease the cost of deployment. Yet IT expenditures continue to go up by about 3 percent to 5 percent a year.

That ease in the cost of deployment, coupled with the flexible infrastructure the cloud supplies, will eventually mean the death of the traditional "per-proc" style of enterprise licensing. Happily, it likely means fantastic opportunities for open-source to take back a large share of the market. I've spent the last year migrating my medium-sized enterprise to the cloud AND a near-100% opensource infrastructure. In my particular sector (healthcare) that's becoming a trend - it's not a coincidence that the move within the medium to medium-large enterprise to the cloud often goes hand-in-hand with a serious investigation of open-source software within the mission-critical, production infrastructure.

Re:Broken how?

[DarkOx]

But out side of ERP systems which almost always get customized, getting a commercial vendor to modify the product to suit your specific needs is nearly impossible, unless your are an F500. That is where Open Source can be a win.

Open source is great when you want some special behavior in the sales quoting tool that only a tiny fractions of others anywhere would want but you otherwise want the base set of features the mass market wants. If you select an open source tool you can make those modifications. If you select a product with a fairly mature code base its probably not even that costly in terms of developer time to keep your patch set applying cleaning against version latest.

 

Waste is what drives the economy

[m94mni]

Just like war, commuting and other essentially completely worthless phenomena, waste of programmer time makes money exchange hands, and therefore increases GNP.

In this case: who would want to be the first to go out on a limb publically and say "I want to decrease the IT sector by 50%"?

Don't blame me, I didn't design that stupid measure.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope their sales engineers were wearing name badges. It would have been unnerving for them to have you stand next to them yelling "YOU ARE NOTHING!" in their ears.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[PhunkySchtuff]

This is a prime example of not listening to what the users want.

It is trival for the software to figure out what the current year is. With a small amount of effort done once on the part of the programmer to convert a day/month (or month/day) date into a full date, the user would have been happy, the software would have worked as they wanted it to and it would have been quicker and less error-prone for them to enter the data.

Instead the software vendor implemented what they thought the user wanted and more importantly didn't listen to the user completely, they implemented half of what the end user wanted and this resulted in more work having to undo the work that had been done to revert the system back to the "old 'n busted" way it was before.

Customers ask for things they want, but the developer needs to be willing to listen to them,

I had a similar thing happen recently, however this was for a database I was developing for my own purposes.

It has a field type of time, but it's really strict - you must enter a time as hh:mm[:ss] AM|PM anything else beeps at you as being invalid (duh)

With some coding effort and a liberal amount of google searching, I was able to have this field exhibit a lot more intelligence and be infinitely more user-friendly. I now have it so that you can enter just about anything that can be interpreted as a time and it'll sort it out. I get the computer, not the user, to do the hard work.

Now, I can enter 800 and it will be 08:00 am (I have a range of hours defined that are AM or PM - 700 is 7pm for instance - this is completely arbitrary and works perfectly for the intended use)

I can enter 1525 and it will enter 3:25 PM, I can enter 4 and it will enter 4PM, I can enter 9 and it will enter 9am. I can enter 12:34 and it will also take it...

It's now a lot quicker for me to quickly enter a few numbers rather than enter numbers separated by colons and an explicit am or pm. It's also a lot less error prone as there's less thought involved, less keystrokes and no need to use a shift+key stroke combination.

In your example, a few more minutes of coding effort to detect a supposedly invalid date (I know what 10/20 is, the user knows what 10/20 is, you know what it is, so tell the computer what it is) and everyone would have been happy.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[timeOday]

No, simply listening to what users want will almost never work - because they don't know. Almost always, they have some vague idea, but that's it.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MagikSlinger]

Amusing. I work for a large utility up here in Canadia, supposedly one of the top 3 purchasers of Oracle & SAP in my province, and we've only seen the sales reps walking around, usually cracking down on not-enough-licenses issues.

Talk to them about an issue or feature you need, and it becomes a chorus of NO's followed by sales people trying to convince us Package X does all that (it doesn't) for a low, low price of Y (it isn't low, and it's always more than Y when the bill comes).

Re:WHAT vendors?

[PhunkySchtuff]

Did you miss the part where I said:

(I have a range of hours defined that are AM or PM - 700 is 7pm for instance - this is completely arbitrary and works perfectly for the intended use)

If I'm booking an onsite technician for instance, they are not going to be onsite at 7am, I'm not sending anyone out that early in the morning, yet it's completely possible they'll be doing work after hours starting at 6 or 7.
In the same light, I'm not sending anyone out to start work at 8pm, but would quite happily have someone going out at 8am.

In this case, what is "retarded" about having a rule that determines that 8 .. 11 is AM and 12, 1 ... 7 is PM?

In the extremely rare situation that this rule doesn't apply, enter the time as "7" for instance and it gets corrected to 07:00 AM, change the A to a P and you're done. Either that, or enter the time as "7p" and it's put in as 7:00 PM

Or would you rather have to enter every single time value as hh:mm:ss AM|PM explicitly?