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Companies Wasted A Billion Dollars On Application Servers

Studies

from the oops dept

Wed, Aug 22nd 2001 4:35pm — Mike Masnick
Gartner is now saying that companies wasted over $1 billion over the past few years investing in high end web application servers that they didn't need. Most web system can be built using much simpler and much cheaper web application servers - and yet companies went out and spent ridiculous sums of money for the big name servers. Of course from 1998 to 2000 (when the study took place) did anyone actually care how much money they were spending? Of course not...
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  • identicon
    Phillip Temple, 22 Aug 2001 @ 7:53pm

    This doesn't surprise me

    I worked for one of (the?) world's top Internet company and we regularly had clients paying up 6-figure sums for CMS licenses. Then I left to work for a company doing specialised CMS systems (if you've read my other comments, it handles press releases online). Actually talking to clients I formed a good relationship with, I found the difference between what I wanted as a techie and what people actually wanted quite eye-opening. I had many grandiose ideas about workflow, version control etc. What top PR people in the large coroporations I spoke to wanted to do was just sling word documents about via email until it was ready then just dump it in. Perhaps much of the problem is that too many of these systems are tech led, with marketing then hired to push (scare?) large companies into helping them recoup their substantial outlay? This isn't to say that projects shouldn't be done to a high level of technical competance. It just goes to show that the best marketing and not the best product wins, and that writing complex applications to include every buzzword isn't necessarily what the customer needs.

    Phillip.

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      xdroop, 23 Aug 2001 @ 6:59am

      Re: This doesn't surprise me

      That's what they say that they want, and that is all that they will pay for -- until someone tries to fork a document, loses some vital changes, or has a critical part of the work flow skipped in the name of expediency (which comes back and bites them on the ass later).

      Then they give the tech guys a hard time for not being able to fix the problem. The tech guys say "I told you so" and are permitted to put up a system which will protect the users from themselves.

      I also think that most of the high-end driven system purchasing was driven by the higher ups who were brainwashed by vendors into thinking that only top of the line systems would do.

      [ link to this | view in chronology ]


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