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Recently a colleague called me up to get my opinion.
Therein lies the eternal drama in organizations, the push & pull between dollars and technology best practices.
We had a similar experience with a MySQL deployment, and solution framed by Oracle sales.
Battle lines are drawn
Clearly the battle lines are drawn now. Between director of operations & team versus management & business stakeholders, between high level and the trenches, or between the systems that support your business and day-to-day running of them.
Business units & management are tasked with budgets, cost management, and long term thinking about trajectory and what’s best for the business. Operations teams are tasked with the day-to-day stability, the command line perspective.
What is the sales team’s position?
Sales guys at Oracle have a job to sell licenses. This isn’t good or bad, it’s their driver. Understanding all the drivers will help us align them.
Sales guys sell to management, so they will likely frame all their stories to management concerns. Also Oracle’s history here is fairly clear. Get customers locked into Oracle up and down the stack, and they become more and more beholden to you as their primary provider. As customers become more dependent, they will begin to squeeze more and more out of them.
Nothing personal, this is how money is made. But understand the goal.
How do OS choices affect the business bottom line?
Standardizing across the enterprise reduces costs & reduces operational complexity. This can reduce risks to operator error & other downtime that increase with more heterogeneous environment.
On the Oracle distribution side, you likely have tweaks to make Oracle run better. However don’t forget the profit motive. Some tweaks may be conveniently “overlooked” in favor of profit. For example for many years the Oracle installer would not complete without error on many Linux systems. Imagine all the professional services that are sold around running through a complex install. Streamlining such an install would *reduce* profits. Don’t laugh.
What happens on the front lines?
On the front lines of course are the ops teams & DBAs, actually installing and supporting enterprise software. Let’s not forget these guys are at the command line. They know inordinately more about what’s really happening down in the trenches. You may find them repeatedly rolling their eyes at salesmen claims.
However they are not the colorful storytellers or communicators that salesmen are, so they may
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Align each division’s interests
Despite cultural differences, business management & operations teams should work hard to connect, and align with one another.
Operations should make an effort to better understand the business bottom line. Money doesn’t grow on trees as they say, and choices have to be based on budget, and real-world needs. We’d all like to sit in a university and program or build things just to create something new, but in a business there are market pressures. All teams should reflect on those.
Management should also make an effort to understand ops teams needs. Why are my ops teams telling me a different story than they Oracle sales guys? Fight the urge to bond with the sales folks, despite their smooth delivery, great suits and peer positioning.
Weigh short and long term tradeoffs
List out advantages & tradeoffs on all sides. These should be technical and business bullet points. Brainstorming a full list like this, and having the whole team discuss the list openly will help the team together come up with a more realistic outcome. Some questions to ask…
1. What are the advantages & disadvantages of having multiple providers for your technology stack?
2. Which solutions are open and which are proprietary? What are the tradeoffs there?
3. What does your team have subject matter expertise in?
4. Are there real technical advantages to one solution or the other?
5. Are there real cost advantages to one solution or the other?
6. Are there expertise advantages & training savings to go one direction?
7. Is the technology widely used in your industry? Will additional or replacement operations experts be easy or hard to find?
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Related posts:
- Beware the client
- Open Insights 22 – Beware of Software Fashion
- Oracle to MySQL – prepare to bushwhack through the open source jungle
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