Oracle and Ingersoll-Rand
An interesting Wall Street Journal article the other day, said that an industrial-products company , Ingersoll-Rand, five years ago spent 18 million dollars on Oracle database software. It's clear from the context that this was not for services , just for pure software.
From the view-point of a middle-class software developer, that is simply astonishing!
If it was total sales of software across a vertical industry, say all industrial-goods companies that are Oracle customers, then that would be one thing, but for a single customer that is truly eye-popping! I hope they're getting their money's worth.
I would love to know the size of the annual check that Pfizer, Merck, and company send to SAS Institute, alas I have not seen that in a newspaper. It's got to be in the millions(per customer). It doesn't really matter though, because my pitch to them relies not so much on getting the price down(important, and easy to explain) but on altering the slowdown in technological innovation and productivity(extremely important, and more subtle than the first point).
Which leads to the question: when does it make sense for a software customer ( a bank , a pharmaceutical company , or a government department) to, instead of playing a passive role(waiting for the salesman to come and just saying yes or no) to play a more active role, a deliberate venture to change the future of the software industry?
Obviously that depends on how much they spend each year on software. But it depends on other things as well.
As I've argued previously, when a certain software category is controlled by a monopoly, that can have long-term negative effects that go beyond price. In the case of statistical software for the pharmaceutical companies, the negative effects are very serious indeed, as I've argued elsewhere. And the easiest way to change the future of the statistical software industry, to make it more competitive and more innovative, is an open source buyout, the financing of a conversion of an already existing proprietary software product to open source status.
From the view-point of a middle-class software developer, that is simply astonishing!
If it was total sales of software across a vertical industry, say all industrial-goods companies that are Oracle customers, then that would be one thing, but for a single customer that is truly eye-popping! I hope they're getting their money's worth.
I would love to know the size of the annual check that Pfizer, Merck, and company send to SAS Institute, alas I have not seen that in a newspaper. It's got to be in the millions(per customer). It doesn't really matter though, because my pitch to them relies not so much on getting the price down(important, and easy to explain) but on altering the slowdown in technological innovation and productivity(extremely important, and more subtle than the first point).
Which leads to the question: when does it make sense for a software customer ( a bank , a pharmaceutical company , or a government department) to, instead of playing a passive role(waiting for the salesman to come and just saying yes or no) to play a more active role, a deliberate venture to change the future of the software industry?
Obviously that depends on how much they spend each year on software. But it depends on other things as well.
As I've argued previously, when a certain software category is controlled by a monopoly, that can have long-term negative effects that go beyond price. In the case of statistical software for the pharmaceutical companies, the negative effects are very serious indeed, as I've argued elsewhere. And the easiest way to change the future of the statistical software industry, to make it more competitive and more innovative, is an open source buyout, the financing of a conversion of an already existing proprietary software product to open source status.
posted by Robert at 4:38 PM
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