Once you go mini...

[Peter Korsten]

Joost Schuttelaar schreef op 25-2-2015 om 23:09:

>> On 25 Feb 2015, at 23:02, Peter Korsten <peter at severity-one.com> wrote:
>>
>> CapEx is good, OpEx is bad.
> Hmm, would you say this is universal at larger companies? What about all these cloud solutions which means a move to periodical pricing?

I'd say this is universal at publicly owned companies. In the end, it's 
the same money that you're spending. (And it's money that you took from 
your customers, so you have to be as careful with it as politicians are 
with money they take from taxpayers... er... never mind.)

Our owners are the shareholders. And shareholders like investments, to a 
certain extent, and they don't like costs. Because investments add value 
to the business, whereas costs detract from it, and this reflects 
directly in the value of their portfolio.

This leads to the situation that we buy JIRA and Confluence with one 
year extra support, but we won't pay for a yearly support subscription - 
if needs be, we buy new licences.

Does that make sense? Depends on how you look at it.

About clouds, I also think that our particular company (Vodafone Malta) 
has not jumped on the bandwagon where everything that is not considered 
core business gets outsourced. We used to have our own cleaners; that is 
now outsourced. Some of our systems are running abroad (Milan and 
Düsseldorf), but that's more of a consolidation within Vodafone.

At some point, it was decided that development was non-core, and would 
be outsourced, provided it made economic sense. It made economic sense 
for all local companies, with the exception of Albania, Egypt and Malta. 
Albania and Egypt have since outsources as well. We, Malta, have 
off-shored it to Vodafone India. There are advantages there, but it's an 
incredibly competitive job market over there. But the point is that 
we're on-boarding development again.

When it comes to cloud services, we'd sooner offer those than use them. 
Practically all our servers are VMs there days, using a SAN. I doubt 
that anybody local would offer the computing and database power that we 
need, and internationally it would take bandwidth off our undersea 
cable, which is a core asset.

It really boils down to the question: what is your corporate identity? 
Are you a marketing firm? Are you a technology firm? Maybe something 
else? People high up realised that, as a mobile phone provider, we are a 
technology firm, and as such you have to be conservative with when 
outsourcing technology.

A "good" example of this are the Dutch railways, who at some point 
decided that their core business is moving people, and that actual 
hard-core technical knowledge about trains is something that is 
non-core, and can be left to consultants. I'm sure you read the papers, 
and the fiasco of the V250 train (more popularly known as the Fyra) has 
this as one of its reasons.

> Wow we’re going off-topic, let me open business-bar at lists.music-bar.org ;)

Based in London, no doubt. :)

- Peter