Imagine for a moment that you head up an IT department of, say, 100
people, and the company is looking at 2 alternative solutions.
The feature set of both products is similar, performance is similar,
even pricing is comparable. As head of IT, your COO and CFO ask you
for a technical appraisal of both solutions.
You look under the hood and discover that Option 1 has the potential
to reduce IT staff numbers to 10% of there current level ! That's
right, your department will shrink from 100 to 10 over the next 18
months by all accounts, as there are similar sized comapnies using
this application with much smaller IT staff numbers.
Option 2 on the other hand will guarantee that the current staffing
level of 100 will remain over the next 2 years, and indeed may need to
be increased with a few additional DBA's.
Now, YOU have to report back to the CFO & COO --> do YOU do the
honourable thing & fall on your sword and have Option 1 installed, or
do you look out for NUMBER 1, and install Option 2 ... and be honest
to yourself here .....
Yes, TCO is relevant, but while ever there are empires at stake,
people will man the battlements and strive to save the empire - and
don't feel too bad, it's human nature !
If you look _at_ TCO for an installed solution, obviously there are
certain TCO elements that would remain constant. If you have a site
with, say, 500 PC workstations deployed across the country running
Win2K & XP, then the infrastructure & support costs with ANY solution
will be more or less constant
(OK, so Nick would deploy "green screens" rather than PC's, so users
will not stuff up windows, there will be less time lost with
"futzing", and fewer moving parts so one would assume less failures
--> but lets discount that Nick !)
So, to simplify the calculation, lets assume we are dealing with a
centralized server running some *nix variant (or Windows if you
prefer!)
The calculations should be fairly straight forward - we are dealing
only with cost of acquisition of hardware & software [not applications
- I've already pegged those as constant for this example, but if Nick
is able to sell a solution at 1/4 the price of an Oracle based
solution, that obviously WILL have an impact on acquisition costs !],
ongoing maintenance (including care & feeding of the DB environment).
For the sake of this exercise, maybe consider a "hypothetical"
application of reasonable complexity that contains around 1,000
tables.
Should we add in development costs for, say, making enhancements to
the base system on an annual basis, as this is also an important
aspect of TCO ? For the sake of my example, could we assume we are
extending the base system "somehow" (each year) by adding, say, 24
additional tables (2 a month may be excessive) with 10-20 fields each,
enhancing 50 existing screen based processes, creating a similar
number of new screens, and likewise amending & creating 50 reports.
Would anyone care to give REAL/INDICATIVE staffing for either side of
the equation ? and hardware size & maintenance costs for database
(once more, lets assume application maintenance is constant .... sorry
Nick!) - assuming a user load of around, say, 200, to keep life simple
