In rereading some of the comments on our recent blog posts, we came upon one from Paul Fenstermacher on our April 1 blog, "Advertising IBM i." Paul's comment was, "... the people that sign the checks are not concerned with TCO, rather they want to know TCA, how much do I have to pay now."
That comment rang horribly true with us and certainly explains some aspects of the current rush to the cloud. Not that there's anything wrong with the basic concept of Cloud computing, but it should surely be part of an overall IT strategy, not the totality of it. However, to a company from the ever-growing group that simply manages to the next quarter, valuing TCA over TCO is the "natural" way to go. You can almost hear them shouting, "Never mind the quality; feel the width.” To such companies, moving everything to the cloud must appear as a very attractive proposition.
So we wondered if this was an area of current business practices that had been reported on or studied. Surprisingly, we found very little that didn't simply qualify as advertising for cloud services. But what we did find was interesting. Check out this piece from back in 2010. It's written from a mainframe perspective but makes a number of points that those of you facing this kind of mentality may be able to use to your advantage. Besides, it is always nice to know you are not alone!
Of course, from a purely IBM i perspective there is actually documented evidence that IBM i leads in both categories. If you find this hard to believe, check out this You and i blog post from Steve Will in late 2012.
On a completely different note, while wandering around in search of TCO/TCA material, we also came upon a great series of articles on "How Not To …" by Jim Schesvold right here on the IBM Systems Magazine website. We're not quite sure how we missed them when they were first published, but since we're sure some of you probably missed them too, we thought we'd pass along the link for the fourth in the series—not because it is better than the others, but because it includes links to the first three. They make for an interesting read, so do yourself a favor and pop over to Jim's piece on sweatshop mentality.
That's all for this week. Now back to work...
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