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Solutions which aren't

2001-07-02 16:59:56+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

Interesting that News.com is running a series on companies like Oracle selling "solutions" which aren't.

It is a scene repeated countless times in the corporate jungle: A company endures months of sales pitches, pays millions of dollars for new software, discovers massive problems, and spends far more to fix the product than the original cost of buying it.

And customers have little choice but to keep eating the expenses while salespeople walk away making up to $1 million in a single year.

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comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:32:01+00 by: ghasty

Ohhhhhh, don't get me started on Oracle "solutions"...we've bite into that bait WAY TOO MUCH here at <large telco I work for>. I'm going thru a new "solution" we purchased to aid in DSL provisioning right now. They seem to have taken a bit of "how to make the solution sell and then consult with the company while actually developing what we told them the solution already could do...still on their dime" knowledge that Amdocs has had for years and ran with it...

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:32:01+00 by: ebradway

<rant> I used to work for a big food manufacturer who relied heavily on Oracle 'Solutions'. Of course that company had a very unique culture and philosophy which extended into their accounting and manufacturing methods. The Oracle apps we used had to be modified HEAVILY and the modifications came at about $150/hour for programmer time.

Unfortuantely, big companies like this don't have the internal sales force to encourage upper management to attempt in-house development. The Oracle sales people are so much more slick that the folks in the IT department. And many times, upper management doesn't believe that their own folks CAN develop applications.

This is how Microsoft embeds itself so deeply in corporations - they make basic administration too easy and provide lots of certified workers to click on their dialog boxes. Big companies frequently don't think they have the brain power to manage a Unix installation. </rant>