Once you go mini...

[Nigel Kersten]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 2:44 PM, Peter Korsten <peter at severity-one.com>
wrote:

> 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.)
>


This is really interesting as I've been seeing a distinct trend towards the
opposite over the last few years in publicly traded companies in the US,
particularly for anything greenfield, and this isn't just coming from
companies that already drank the managed-service-provider kool-aid.

Failed projects with a pure OpEx component can be switched off and that's
the end of your financial pain.



>
> 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.
>

It totally makes sense, but I think there's a difference between the US and
the rest of the world in this regard.

Our US and Australian customers are tilting hard towards pure cloud and
OpEx, whereas our European and Asian customers grow to a certain point and
then pull their cloud services on-premise into their own data centers and
focus heavily on CapEx.

Growing distrust of US-based cloud services certainly isn't helping, but
I'm not sure it's a major factor.

Do you think that Vodafone being an MSP themselves changes perspective
internally?



>
> 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.


That story is so wonderfully representative of a certain kind of terrible
misstep :)


>
>
>  Wow we’re going off-topic, let me open business-bar at lists.music-bar.org
>> ;)
>>
>
> Based in London, no doubt. :)
>
> - Peter
>
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