[clusmore]

> I was, on the other hand, hoping to promote healthy discussion and pose some good questions related to IT procurement here in Australia. There needs to be a happy medium between what I've wired up and an $86M solution.

A related story for this discussion: QUT students design a $500 cloud-based census server four times better than IBM’s $9 million system [1]

[1] http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/qut-students-design...

[dllthomas]

"four times better"

I have two objections, which the article doesn't seem to fully address.

First, do we know that the server the students designed actually met the spec handed to IBM? Often times a lot of the complexity of a project comes from the interaction of a few features. It's quite possible that the version the students provided didn't actually do the hard stuff. We know from the article that they specifically didn't address any security/privacy ramifications of sitting running in the cloud.

We also don't know how many similar projects were attempted and failed. Sometimes things just come together, way quicker and cheaper than should have been expected.

[clusmore]

I'm not endorsing the work done by the student, I just thought it was relevant to the discussion. I agree completely that they probably haven't addressed all of the requirements or gone through the rigorous testing and verification required. Not to mention that when things go wrong you want somebody you can hold accountable.