A rant about ZendPlatform

[Bill McGonigle]

On Feb 5, 2006, at 10:46, Jason Stephenson wrote:

> There's a saying that I've heard about SAP, "We don't change SAP to 
> suit your business, you change your business to suit SAP."

I haven't been involved with SAP, but I can vouch for that being true 
of PeopleSoft.  I watched a project balloon to well over 5x its 
budgeted cost (where x > $1M) at a place I used to work including a 
team of at least a half a dozen new people to support it.

Departments and processes were all re-orged to fit the PeopleSoft 
model, and those costs aren't even counted in the IT budget.  And, no, 
they won't fixed-price-quote an installation for you.

See, "If you're spending $15M for a software package, you can afford a 
few administrative staff to support it," is the logic in this realm.  
And if you're in a corporate IT environment where (headcount + budget) 
== (power + importance) a project with $15 + 6 people _must_ be 
powerful and important.  If you just did 'yum install PeopleSoft' it 
wouldn't make it into many organizations.

You have to give props to their sales team.  Imagine if Open Source had 
that kind of persuasive power behind it!

(no idea what's become of their practices since Oracle swallowed them)

-Bill
-----
Bill McGonigle, Owner           Work: 603.448.4440
BFC Computing, LLC              Home: 603.448.1668
bill at bfccomputing.com           Cell: 603.252.2606
http://www.bfccomputing.com/    Page: 603.442.1833
Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/
VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf