[parasubvert]

And then there is Elon Musk who told his CIO to build their own manufacturing planning system because he refused to give that much money to SAP or Oracle.

Ps. Having migrated an SAP off of AIX, I'd say you'd be better served with something like a VBlock or even VirtuStream or Amazon cloud to run it. There also are price and performance incentives to run R/4 on HANA than on Oracle.

[stephengillie]

Vblock is a management and communication nightmare. It runs on an independent AD domain with no integration with your own environment. It's just like having your own hardware in your own rack, but you have to call them to fix what you'd just normally fix internally. You have to have people who know VMWare, Cisco, and SAN to run one, more efficient to just set up a vCenter.

[parasubvert]

You can fix a VBlock yourself quite fine if you stay within its constraints, though the point is to get out of the business of fixing this stuff yourself - it's undifferentiated heavy lifting. Wire and walk away as a transition towards data center zero. Yes theyre isolated by design, but unified management isnt hard to do. I've seen places save tens of millions getting off IBM or EDS outsourcing replaced with converged.

[stephengillie]

Well, if you're consolidating by replacing five vendors with one, that can have cost savings in unified billing and administration alone, and simplified environment management - one stop for all your server needs - is indeed another benefit.

I've been a contractor for a firm that still runs their own mainframe for data transformation, and had Cisco experts on the payroll. They ran their own vCenter instances integrated with their Active Directory, so moving with them to Vblock was painful mostly in giving up control.

[hkmurakami]

Musk isn't worryabout being fired and making his mortgage payments (eve though he once came perilously close to being broke on his liquid investments). Most people charged with making IT decisions are worried about this.

[parasubvert]

Ahh, but should one act in business to not get fired, or to do the right thing for the organization?

I personally couldn't look myself in the mirror , speaking as a former VP of IT ops at a large company, if I made a decision where the primary concern was for my job stability. In fact, the fact that I could get fired for making the difficult choice usually was a good sign. I'm not talking about making reckless decisions, I'm talking things like firing IBM outsourcing because they're price gouging and risking the inevitable call to our board of directors that is attempting to get me and my boss (the CIO) fired.

That said I do agree many IT people make the decision for their own stability first, and the company second. That usually is due to a poor business leader that promotes a risk averse culture - unlike a Reed Hastings or Elon Musk.