Are they really going to save 400 m$, or was it the figure "promised" by the shop that will handle the migration?
$400M sounds huge, but why do I think it’s trivial next to FedEx’s operating budget? A couple years ago they were making 18 Billion* a quarter. * edited from million (meant to type billion)
FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
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Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#82Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…
You can say the same thing for hundreds of parts of a company like FedEx. For example FedEx flies Boeing jets. It's completely reliant on Boeing for parts for those jets. Presumably Boeing can charge whatever it wants. Your company is always going to be reliant on other suppliers and contracts. Unless you're planning on building your own independent country in some location that has all the natural resources you need…
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#83Is there any gain here aside from cost saving? Will this saving be passed on to the customer? ( laughs ). What happens when the inevitable AWS outage then causes a global shipping bottleneck? Have we still not learnt that having sovereignty is better than saving money? Has COVID taught us nothing? sigh
What’s to gain other than $400M in savings every year indeed? If it drops all the way to the bottom line, that would boost their 2022 profits by 35% and 2021 profits by about 45%. Seems like a decision you have to consider, even with possible failure modes.
Wikipedia says their net profit for 2021 was $75 billion, so your math seems off.
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#84Surely FedEx would have a metric shit ton of data?
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#85Are they really going to save 400 m$, or was it the figure "promised" by the shop that will handle the migration?
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#86Where are they using all of these data centers and mainframes? That is they are spending at least 400 million to do what exactly? To me that seems like rather high figure in any case for their sites and logistics...
I imagine Twitter could also be built over a weekend, right? :-)
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#87Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#88Where are they using all of these data centers and mainframes? That is they are spending at least 400 million to do what exactly? To me that seems like rather high figure in any case for their sites and logistics...
Yep... A couple of million of packages daily + tracking a fleet of vehicles, client facing site, apis for their tracking and courrier services/devices plus some internal services (billing etc...).. this seems like it would fit on a few racks, not nearly 400million, or whatever the full number is (since 400m are just the savings). But yeah... old company, they might still have stuff written in cobol virtualized somewh…
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#89Where are they using all of these data centers and mainframes? That is they are spending at least 400 million to do what exactly? To me that seems like rather high figure in any case for their sites and logistics...
With (most likely) 0 knowledge about the internal details of their business, but with the confidence of the average programmer: "they spend too much". I imagine Twitter could also be built over a weekend, right? :-)
Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s to gain other than $400M in savings every year indeed? If it drops all the way to the bottom line, that would boost their 2022 profits by 35% and 2021 profits by about 45%. Seems like a decision you have to consider, even with possible failure modes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx Wikipedia says their net profit for 2021 was $75 billion, so your math seems off.
That said, it seems like $75B is wildly too high as well. Page 43 of their most recent annual report shows a consolidated net income for the year ending May 31, 2021 as $5.2B, making $400M still a 7.5% boost (if it all passes through).
https://investors.fedex.com/financial-information/annual-rep...
https://s21.q4cdn.com/665674268/files/doc_financials/annual/...