[NBLUG/talk] [Fwd: Linux Management Survey Results]

[S. Saunders]

On Mon, February 13, 2006 13:55, Eric Eisenhart wrote:

> This might be of interest to some of you.

<SNIP>

The thing I've never really seen these surveys and studies address (and,
from the Executive Summary (haven't read the whole whitepaper!) this one
STILL doesn't address) is the "Barrier Cost" issue -- if you've got no
"Skill X" in-house, but DO have (lots of) "Skill Y," there's a substantial
$$$-barrier to adding "Skill X".  Data from shops like this cannot be
compared, apples-to-apples, with data from shops that allready have both
skills well-represented in-house.

Specifically, a medium-sized 24/7 shop with 15-20 (or more) IT folks who
are MS-Win-savvy, and NOBODY with *NIX skills, is going to find a HUGE
cost-barrier to adding 24/7 *NIX support -- that's a *minimum* of 3
*NIX-geeks, probably more like 5 (assuming you want 24/7 coverage).  They
might save some costs by hiring only a couple of senior people, and
training-up some of their existing staff as juniors; but it's still
non-trivial money in a lump-sum (i.e. you won't have acceptable levels of
support 'til your budget has taken its lumps...) between new-hires and
sending several people for $3K - $10K of training each.

Not that this problem is specific to *NIX... a *NIX-house who wants to add
MS-Win infrastructure will face the same issues, or an AS/400 house adding
either one, etc etc etc.

THAT is, IMHO, the (genuine) issue that lets MS claim (with some semblance
of truth) that MS-Win has a lower "TCO":  a Win-centric shop rolling out a
new MS-Win-based initiative *WILL* (IMHO) have a lower "TCO" than a
comparable *NIX-based project... if they roll into the project-costs the
whole issue of adding / integrating *NIX infrastructure / staff / etc.

If, instead, they treat *NIX as an "asset" and they "leverage" it (and
amortize it across all the projects for which *NIX is judged the better
technology; and credit any cost-benefits for *NIX-is-cheaper projects
*back* to the original costs of implementing *NIX)... _THEN_ I expect a
much more accurate picture will be seen.

But, as I said, I haven't seen such studies (so far).  OTOH, I'm a geek
rather than a marketroid, so I haven't been *pursuing* the studies (just
peeking at' em when they come my way, as this one did...)


- Steve S.