Dana Quinn made the following keystrokes: >This discussion makes me wonder - *why* isn't there a really good >commercial product? (and I do believe there isn't a good commercial >product). The addressable market seems big... like if a company got >it right (solving both small and big company needs) they could make a >lot of money.
I think the last line above is the exact reason why commercial products have not been the mass success to the people on this list. If you have the greatest multiplatform config mgmt system you are going to want to charge big $$$$$$ for it. Something for the server then more for each client. As a potential customer, I need to evaluate the overall costs, not just the purchase cost, but maint, installation, migration, etc. Chances are during the test/eval phase you'll find that this product only covers about 90% of what you want done. In many cases that's the 90% you already have cobbled together. That last 10% is HARD. There are several commercial products out there. I haven't looked at them recently. The last time I did, the cost was about the same as 4 full time staff. Then the staffing to deal with the system would be 1 or 2 people to run the "system" and another 2 or 3 people to deal with exceptions exceptions we knew about. Probably more would be needed to deal with the systems that couldn't be put into this "solution". --Gene _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
