Why Big Name Enterprise Search Is So Costly
December 17, 2010
“How Much Time Out of Your Day Does IBM Waste?” is about IBM’s WebSphere Application Server and related components. The author does a good job of explaining how undocumented dependencies and bugs suck up his work time. Of course, a company that relies on IBM technology has made a business decision that probably had little to do with the challenges the firm’s technical professionals must face on an on going basis.
Here’s a passage from the write up that caught my attention:
The sad thing is that RAD is nothing but Eclipse, weighted down with IBM plugins and I love Eclipse. The latest release, Helios, is one of the nicest IDEs that you can use and it is totally free. It does everything RAD can do and it leaves a lighter foot print…
If this is an accurate statement, it shines a bright light on IBM’s use of open source technology. I am not sure I enjoy what the light shows me. Like many other 66 year old geese, I prefer the stage illusion of a well-oiled machine and its bullet proof engineering. Reality is often different from the marketing collateral I suppose.
The other passage I downloaded to my IBM file was this one:
No one ever calculates the lost productivity when the consider IBM products and really no one looks at the amount of money spent either. There are plenty of open source solutions that are faster, easier to configure and support is a Google away. My preference is to use Tomcat. Since every sane developer pretty much uses Spring anyway, Tomcat is the perfect choice and it is easy to support and maintain. JBoss is another great choice if you must have more J2EE container features, but again, by using Spring, they are mostly unnecessary.
Lost productivity. That means money. And when chief financial officers look to reduce costs, will the beancounter’s eyeballs focus on the expenses (both direct and indirect) that some large vendors’ software imposes? I know the answer is, “It depends.”
And enterprise search?
OmniFind 9.x is based on open source technology. I did this mental calculation: What’s the cost of direct and indirect engineering associated with a full IBM-centric search system? I ran through the costs of the hardware, field replaceable units, engineering support, and maintenance for WebSphere, OmniFind, and training for the bits and pieces? How much?
A lot. What got me thinking was that IBM is using open source to generate revenue for its high margin businesses like consulting, engineering support, and maintenance.
The point of the Jeviathon article was that he wanted to use other, lower cost tools, but the IBM commitment locks in certain technical challenges and, of course, the revenue for IBM from services.
After reading Jeviathon’s article, I formed a different impression of IBM’s commitment to open source. Thinking about Oracle’s stance on open source, I concluded that open source may be a stalking horse. If big name search vendors follow in IBM’s footsteps, the deployments have built in costs that may be difficult to control.
Big time search solutions are expensive because they are designed to generate a revenue stream for the vendor. No problem with that, of course. I like the idea of open source software providing the base and then the vendor wrapping the solution in Velcro so the hook dig in and keep the money flowing from the client to IBM. Would IBM take such actions to generate revenue? I don’t know, and it is an interesting hypothesis to consider.
Stephen E Arnold, December 17, 2010
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