alt Hacker NewsNow imagine you save $10M a year doing it
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It’s rarely that clean. Sure, there is the immediate sticker price, but you have to factor in the migration costs as well. Depending on how deep the integration goes, it could take years of effort. All of which is going to take political capital to get people to migrate perfectly working systems without any operational gain. Plus you have the old guard who actively fight you-maybe they have spent their career in Oracle and that is all they know.
Even if you do move mountains and make it happen, suddenly any outages after the transition become your fault. “This never happened on the old system.”
True words. I've seen this technique used to force people to think realistically. It goes like this (example):
- Is it possible for a 3 person team to manage 1000 distinct Kubernetes clusters?
- No way in hell!
- What if we hypothetically pay you $2M salary each?
- Well, let me think about it, we could figure this out...
Once upon a time, our team was paying Oracle $6 million a year in DB licenses alone. We ended up building our own bespoke storage solution.
That's about how much it cost my company to move the flagship off of z/OS. That kept the language (Cobol) and DB2 intact (moved to DB2LUW); just a new build target basically.
It took like 5 or 6 years and that $10M represents the cost of only 10 months of operations on Z.
Now imagine the switch is going to cost you $100M in downtime and change consultants, if it succeeds at all, and your new provider will up the price in a few years time anyway.
It's not really going to benefit ME anything. It will benefit my employer this amount. I might get an extra bonus for successful migration, but it's peanuts compared to the savings.
So in such situation, I'd be tempted to actively oppose this initiative.
Now imagine you risk breaking $100M in order to save $10M.
Imagine you think you save… You only save after you have paid…
Why would any Enterprise Software vendor leave $10M on the table?
> Now imagine you save $10M a year doing it
only after the move is complete and assuming it's as successful as you think it would be. What usually happens is the migration takes on a life of its own and is a multi-year if not multi-decade project. It sucks up so much money and effort that a business could be using to actually build their business vs migration to a different database. Meanwhile, the account execs of the old system know you're moving off of it so say good bye to any kind of contract discounts or special treatment during emergencies.
There's entire graveyards of failed enterprise system migrations. The most likely outcome is eventually a compromise has to be made and now you have two systems to maintain and license, the legacy one, and the new one. With the promise of eventually getting off the old one but it never happens.
I'm on a project with a client that has 24 ERPs across their enterprise around the globe from acquisitions. Half of them are ERPs that were meant to replace another one but the transition was never completed. A big part of this project is integrating all of their sales pipelines, analytics, and history into, yet another, enterprise system.