I was reading a very interesting article in Computing recently that finally touches on one of the questions that frustrates me more than any other during my working day.
With key clients operating in financial markets and in the public sector, many with respected market leading solutions, I am sometimes asked to assist with the question “Why is your application not written in Microsoft or Oracle?”
In most cases, we have satisfied the users that the solution ticks all of the business case boxes, it fits within the available budget, and the sponsor, decision maker and evaluator are all happy and signed up to the purchase. It then goes to IT with the request to identify a suitable central server to host the application for final enterprise wide testing. At this point IT get involved and out comes the question and another round of justification begins!!!
This becomes even more frustrating when you know that OpenInsight applications usually require fewer resources than many RDBMS based systems, they don’t normally impact on other software on the server and they can play quite happily with most backup and failover systems.
So why does this question keep coming up?
In truth, we all know the answers – ‘Perceived’ cheap widely available RDBMS resources, staff wanting to stay in their comfort zones, the opportunity to stay buzz word compliant, etc. – all regardless of the impact on the business.
I’ll leave you to review the full article and draw your own conclusions, but it is nice to know that finally, people are beginning to question why IT staff are still trying to dictate what technology should be used, rather than purchasing the best solution for the business requirement and user productivity - regardless of what it is written in!
Click here for the full article entitled ‘How careerism can warp IT procurement’.
