Re: Total Cost of Ownership

>"Laconic2" <laconic2_at_comcast.net> wrote in message
>
> Dawn,
>
> Your description of the experiences that led you to your current struggle
> set me to thinking in a new direction. I want to explore this business of
> TCO. But first I have a few preliminary questions.
>
> First, what is PICK for? I'm not really ready, at this point, to absorb a
> whole lot about how it works. All I want to know is what it is for.

PICK is for storing an application and its data and for executing and retrieving said application and data. It's like an application encapsulation, this came from my buzzword generator. :-)

> Second, what leads you to attribute the success of certain groups to their
> use of PICK?

I'm not speaking for Dawn. The use of PICK flourishes where business owners and partners require business specific computing at a very low cost. Most of the time the owners and partners develop the application and use it over a long period of time to solve their specific business needs, making changes and enhancements as they use the application. This model was very conducive to rapid business prototyping and implementation, since those who know the business were writing the application.

Historically PICK had been a complete o/s and application server all wrapped up in a single box. It also lent itself greatly to reduced maintenance and support. Almost all PICK applications are multi-user with record locking (row level locking) and other modern contention management included. In addition, it has a small footprint on hardware and uses much less hardware than other applications do.

> Third, what do you think pushes up the TCO in major SW applications?
> Alternatively, what pushes downward on the total benefits of ownership?

I believe the main TCO in major SW applications are:

1. hardware and o/s type software,
2. development and/or licenses,
3. installation and training,
4. maintenance and support,
5. administration,
6. enhancements and upgrades, and
7. end-of-life retirement/replacement.

Certain factors (competition) contribute to lower costs:

1. improvements in hardware speed, capacity, and price,
2. development techniques and methodologies,
3. user interface standards (across applications),
4. commoditization of databases,
5. open source utilities and software components (sendmail, etc),
6. functional equivalence (do by hand, don't fix what's not broken, etc).

Hope this is of interest.

Bill Received on Mon Apr 19 2004 - 23:18:39 CDT