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Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

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Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#311

Post by iandanforth »

legulere wrote: post #248
davidajackson wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should build a webpage that does this: 1. Enter salary of engineer. 2. Enter cost per engineer of product (subscription, one time, etc.). 3. Enter required minutes to make worth your time (setup per employee can be factored in). This may already exist, but if it doesn't it could be a useful tool for Saas companies. Something you could drop into emails to potential customers ("see how much you would save"). Wo…

So something like this: https://xkcd.com/1205/ ?

Now I'm wondering if I can automate my VPN login. Apparently I can spend 3-4 days on the automation and come out ahead!

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#312

Post by theklub »

crazygringo wrote: post #247

Look, either it's worth it or it's not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn't be buying them if they weren't providing more value than they cost. But: > enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software Sorry but I can't wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000 /year. A…

What about VMware, backup software, system monitoring software, update software, remote support and meeting apps. Spam filter, Terminal server licensing. There’s more I’m forgetting

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#313

Post by crazygringo »

iamaelephant wrote: post #300
crazygringo wrote: post #247

Look, either it's worth it or it's not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn't be buying them if they weren't providing more value than they cost. But: > enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software Sorry but I can't wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000 /year. A…

> Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000/year. Really? You can imagine only #83/mo in software costs for a working professional? I think you're being really rather unimaginative.

I'm not trying to be super-imaginative, I'm trying to be realistic. That's the point.

Considering Office 365 is $10/mo (before volume discounts) and is probably the main tool most office workers use, I am having a hard time how on earth you get to $10K/12=$833/mo.

I'm supposed to believe the average office worker uses a total of subscription software that is eighty times more expensive than Microsoft Office?

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#314

Post by walshemj »

fludlight wrote: post #83
phkahler wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, total cost would be a better measure since there is no per-person cost to the SaaS provider. If you have 10,000 employees that's $100M per year in expenses. If you're just renting payroll, purchasing, etc software for that price it'd be far cheaper to roll your own, or pay a few people to work on OSS full time.

Rolling your own payroll is about as good an idea as rolling your own crypto.

One large company (170k employees) I worked at switched from an in house payroll system to an external month.

Second month was a disaster in the end they had to physically cut the tape on the last remaining partially destroyed copy - about 20% got paid on time.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#315

Post by leetcrew »

a13n wrote: post #308
SonicScrub wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That number doesn't surprise me. Your quick $1000-$2000 estimate is probably accurate for a typical office worker, but the more specialized positions skew the average. I work in mechanical/aerospace engineering for a large company. A lot of the software we use is very specialized and very costly. Here's the yearly costs from the top 4 softwares I use based on a quick google search: 1) $35,000 2) $15,000 3) $10,000 4)…

That's per license, per employee? Or company-wide license fee? If the latter, you still need to divide by the total number of users of the product.

if GP works in aerospace, those are very likely per-seat license costs.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#316

Post by a1369209993 »

nradov wrote: post #294
a1369209993 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, it is literally possible for an employee to have so many payroll deductions including court-ordered wage garnishment that net pay would be negative. How do you handle that in all legal jurisdictions where the company operates? By issuing a error and demanding that a human deal with it. Obviously.

Surely you jest? If that was a serious comment then you obviously have no understanding of the business and legal requirements for payroll systems.

If you're legally required do your payroll with a buggy computer system rather than manually (and not even "this specific buggy computer that we gave you", just any old buggy piece of crap), then, uh, I don't really know what to say to that. My condolences, I guess?

If you mean it's impractical and error-prone to do payroll manually, well that's the point of automating >99.999% of it. For the remaining someone is going to have decide how to deal with it, and I'm sceptical that a programmer seven years ago will know better than a lawyer today what the legal requirements today are.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#317

Post by fludlight »

walshemj wrote: post #314
fludlight wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rolling your own payroll is about as good an idea as rolling your own crypto.

One large company (170k employees) I worked at switched from an in house payroll system to an external month. Second month was a disaster in the end they had to physically cut the tape on the last remaining partially destroyed copy - about 20% got paid on time.

Switching a large enterprise software system is almost as time consuming, expensive, and error prone as developing a replacement in-house. You would have experienced substantial problems even if it was in-house -> in-house-rewrite or external->in-house or external-a -> external-b.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#318

Post by achenatx »

crazygringo wrote: post #247

Look, either it's worth it or it's not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn't be buying them if they weren't providing more value than they cost. But: > enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software Sorry but I can't wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000 /year. A…

once you start talking about SAP and other enterprise software you are talking big $$

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#319

Post by bdcravens »

jonathankoren wrote: post #298
prostheticvamp wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whom is it not worth it? Software devs? Are they representative of the average white collar? I couldn’t live without excel.

I use spreadsheet programs all the time during software development. it's a great way to quickly look at data or do some calculations. I use Numbers. Is it as good as Excel, not really, but it's good enough (although data import is still a bit lacking), and it's not a subscription.

I have a data import task I run about once a week - I've found Numbers does a better job not screwing the date field up I add than Excel does when I export to CSV (for import into our relational database)

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#320

Post by jankiehodgpodge »

swiley wrote: post #267
crazygringo wrote: post #247

Look, either it's worth it or it's not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn't be buying them if they weren't providing more value than they cost. But: > enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software Sorry but I can't wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000 /year. A…

MS office is probably one of them. Office 365 isn’t worth it but most people don’t seem to know that.

Office 365 is a bit more than some office apps though, you have teams, OneDrive, planner, forms, Todo, powerapps, stream and so on... It actually replaces a whole stack of SAAS apps most companies are already shelling out for.
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