By: Cris Wendt
Ironically, one of the members of our Global Consulting Services organization at Acresso had to learn the true costs of a build-it-yourself approach the hard way.
"Michael", one of our top system architects and implementation consultants had a legacy sprinkler system in his yard. Michael recently bought a house in the central valley of California with a lawn and garden sprinkler system that had been installed by the previous tenant. Of course, the previous owner is now long gone and he didn’t leave much documentation behind. The demands of the sprinkler system had increased, as Michael had new requirements to extend the system to include watering an extended portion of lawn and drip into a garden area. He was done with using the hose and manual sprinkler to get the job done. To update his automated sprinkler system, he needed to add another circuit to his legacy system and add some new types of sprinkler heads. This required some new plumbing, and ideally, a new control unit and a re-design of the sprinkler control units.
Michael could have hired the job out to a local plumber who could install new equipment, added newer control units, and re-design the new circuit in less than a day. But, being an engineer, Michael said to himself, "Hey, I can do this myself, and, I can save a few bucks in the process. We don’t need to re-design the pipes, nor add a new control unit". Michael, did in fact do the job on a warm August weekend, and returned to work on Monday with a nice tan.
A week later, we were working with a customer who was going through a similar experience with their entitlement management requirements. They had a legacy ERP system and needed enhanced functionality to accommodate the growing needs of their software business. Their needs seemed simple. They needed fewer manual steps and a more automated entitlement and customer license fulfillment process. In the room were the 2 lone marketing managers and their business requirements, surround by a lot of business process people and IT architects. The company had spent months evaluating different systems, and decided to build-out and extend their legacy system to accommodate some new requirements to automate more processes. The ROI analysis they did showed that it would be less expensive to build it themselves. They also spent months in mockups, trying to design for every possible business process scenarios; all while making different architectural design assumptions. In the meantime, a competitor had updated their offering and had created competitive havoc in the field.
While we were helping the client to think through all of the activities associated with the entitlement lifecycle of software, Michael received an email on his Blackberry from his wife who was at home. In the email was the single word, "Yikes", along with an attached picture of a very flooded side yard. The legacy sprinkler system that Michael had built upon had malfunctioned due to a brief power spike, and all of the sprinkler control units were activated simultaneously. This led to (pardon the pun) an over-entitlement of water in his yard. To make matters worse, his large dogs were in the area and decided to have some fun and wrestle in the mud. This activity caused them to break a long, exposed pipe, leading to an unrestrained flow of water into the side yard. The result was an undermined concrete walkway and potential damage to the concrete foundation of the house. Michael’s initial cost-savings were over-run by the unexpected costs of the real "lifecycle" of the sprinkler system. It seems the build vs. buy analysis was incomplete and inaccurate.
As Michael returned to the customer meetings, the discussions were still continuing and the final design is more than nine months away. Hopefully, the decision to build won’t result in a flooded foundation.
Is your company debating "build vs. buy" for a licensing and entitlement system? Let us know!
In the meantime:
- Take the 2009 Software Pricing and Licensing Survey for software producers and high tech manufacturers.
- Check out my new V-Smart Radio episode: Virtualization: a Brave New World.
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