[sbarre]

> Big companies are starting to learn that free open source can be supported in house

Sure but the problem here is can you find and retain the people who can do that work, if you are a big lumbering "un-interesting" company where tech is not your core focus? In most cases the answer is "no".

There's a reason major software vendors provide professional services. If their customers could reliably hire and (most importantly) retain experts on their own, they wouldn't need professional services.

[nobody9999]

>There's a reason major software vendors provide professional services. If their customers could reliably hire and (most importantly) retain experts on their own, they wouldn't need professional services.

This. As a tech person with decades of professional services experience in the tech space, I couldn't agree more.

Generally, there are three reasons why corporate entities hire professional services (this isn't limited to tech stuff either):

1. There's a specific need for design/implementation expertise where FTEs are either not readily available or are unnecessary once the implementation is complete;

2. The internal group in favor of a particular technology/implementation wants/needs validation from "experts" to get full buy-in from management;

3. Professional services are brought in to "validate" existing project plans/implementation details as a CYA against project failure (e.g., "the consultants told us this was the way to go. They were wrong, not us.") which (both bringing in consultants and project failure) happens a lot more often than you might think.

[bluGill]

Those are all valid points. However those are also the counter argument: eventually the cost of all those services is more than the cost to do it in house, or find a competitor.

[sbarre]

Yeah but again, it's most often not about the money...

I work for a large enterprise and we pay or retain vendors to do things for us all the time, at a much higher cost than it would be to do it in house, because we cannot find/hire/retain the expertise to do it ourselves, and at some point we need to get the work done so that other more mission-critical work can happen to drive the business forward.

Plus, there is value in paying someone to make the find/hire/retain part their problem instead of ours.

We buy the reliability of getting the work done in a timely manner, on top of the work itself.