281–290 of 321 posts
I used to work at Bank of America as a level 2 app analyst back when they first started building Quartz. At the time, it was advertised internally as a system to be used for reporting, and so it had lots of built-in functionality to connect to databases, etc. Pretty neat. That said. The method of encoding production database credentials was rot-13 . No joke. In the Quartz interface, you could double click on a starre…
Could you share the winner?
I think a strong argument can be made either way. There's definitely financial savings to be had by doing it in-house (either literally or utilizing existing data centers as here). But what I've experienced is that companies are often attracted to Big Cloud™ not just for financial reasons but to flatten/simplify their corporate reporting structure. It is the ultimate delegation. This isn't simply about having fewer s…
> This isn't simply about having fewer staff (although that can reduce internal politics and inefficiencies), but making fewer decisions and more importantly reducing the potential for making the wrong decisions This is a myth directly from cloud providers marketing campaigns: that using the cloud simplifies infrastructure to the point that you don't need as much and/or as qualified staff. In reality it is quite the…
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What's worse, someone being a prima donna or the unchangeable facts of AWS operation policies? You will always encounter roadblocks and misfeatures, but can you get around them? Don't get me wrong, most corporate IT is deeply incompetent at their core job. It's just that you can't fix the deep problems by outsourcing the computer part.
> What's worse, someone being a prima donna or the unchangeable facts of AWS operation policies? There's this great thing about BOA-sized support contracts where you get to call up the senior product managers and demand that they build the features that you want. And if you're not happy about something, engineers will drop what they're working on to appease you. I wonder how many customers were interested in setting…
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The difference between renting and purchasing gets murky (sure, not literally) when you are dealing with sensitive hardware that you rely on but cannot maintain yourself. Such systems usually require frequent maintenance by the supplier. Sure, you could end your maintenance contracts, but then the systems you have purchased will very rapidly become useless. The up-front cost of hardware is often very small compared t…
I guess I have a naive view. I think of "buy" as something which is a capital expenditure, can be depreciated, etc. while "rent" are things which fall under operational expenditure. With that in mind, I can see support contracts as an operational expenditure. But if "over half of industrial robot purchases in North America have been made by automakers" then that's a lot of capital expenditure. I never got the feel th…
An assembly line isn't really a "product," per se. It's more of amalgamation of several products and technologies, many legacy, that forms a cohesive but loosely-coupled whole. You may have several vendors' products / systems in a line. So what you end up with are ongoing contracts that provide for installation, programming, troubleshooting, maintenance, etc.
There's actually a whole specialized industry that does nothing but design assembly lines. It's pretty neat.
$2B = 40% savings means their opex was $5B and now it's $3B. That is high expense. Guessing most of it is licensed software costs? Like Oracle on every single core?!?
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> Auto manufacturers use machines built by other businesses and parts built by other businesses. Yeah but they generally aren't renting those machines. Renting critical pieces of business infrastructure that aren't easily replaceable is opening yourself up to rent seeking on the part of your supplier. Remember the Oracle business model--lock people in and then keep raising the price just below what it would cost to r…
I don't think the renting example is that true. AFAIK auto manufacturers certainly do "rent" many of the factory machinery they use, and they certainly "rent" the maintenance contracts from the companies who service them (the big exception I'm aware of being Toyota, which makes their own factory robotics). In other examples, many airlines do lease airplanes, and even among the airlines that do own the planes, they st…
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This must be a jab, but obviously yes. Last year they had $28 billion in net income. With that kind of money you can hire the best in the world to build literally whatever you want. They could go build a space shuttle if they felt like it - probably without much trouble. In the unlikely situation that it didn't work, they'd pay someone else to fix it or re-do it. The least likely (albeit not unprecedented) end situat…
Boeing can't even make an airplane without trouble and you think BoA could churn out a space shuttle? The space shuttle program was estimated to have cost $200B.
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I guess I have a naive view. I think of "buy" as something which is a capital expenditure, can be depreciated, etc. while "rent" are things which fall under operational expenditure. With that in mind, I can see support contracts as an operational expenditure. But if "over half of industrial robot purchases in North America have been made by automakers" then that's a lot of capital expenditure. I never got the feel th…
Many of these industrial systems are built from reusable components. In my experience at a Tier 1 OEM for the US domestic auto market, a line could be torn down and re-purposed to another line by adding or removing physical components, modifying the physical layout where appropriate, and then adjusting the PLC programming. An assembly line isn't really a "product," per se. It's more of amalgamation of several product…
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> This is a myth directly from cloud providers marketing campaigns I agree the cloud providers like this idea, but I'm not sure I agree it's a myth. Businesses need to choose what competencies to focus on. For nearly every other area, businesses rely on suppliers. Auto manufacturers use machines built by other businesses and parts built by other businesses. They also obviously do some amount of in-house part and tool…
I think a company that saves $2B (meaning they were able and willing to spend even more before they had this idea) is more than able to have multiple competencies. Acquisition and vertical integration is how many companies became massive. Of course it's a question of scale, but a lot of arguments I've seen usually come down to CapEx vs OpEx accounting which is silly because a dollar is a dollar.
The cloud is powerful, but for long running businesses who can afford to invest in the competancy it's stupidly expensive. Hybrid cloud installations are ever more the norm, private clouds increasingly capable (PaaS, IaaS, SaaS), and toolsets like Kubernetes reshape how a lot of those legacy apps get looked at.
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Yeah but you don’t need data center engineers, real estate specialists. Power specialists. Etc.
Sure. You just need more people to keep an eye on what your consumption rates are. Or to handle access control systems or manage service accounts and client certificates, ensure firewalls, additional tooling around firewalls to ensure things aren’t getting exposed outside. Countless cost projections on top of a complicated billing system. I mean. You save the headcount in one area and you consume it in another. And y…
I think it's a loooot easier to design and build a cost-efficient multi-tiered high availability application than it is to make reasonable cost projections in whatever micro-currency every seconary and tertiary service uses.
And I'm ever surprised by how time-intensive it is.