[consulting] Successful large enterprise deployments of Drupal

[Gunnar Langemark]

I make my money by working for a Microsoft Partner (is that word allowed 
in here? ;-9)
I live in Denmark.

Whenever I talk about how Open Source can do what clients want - and do 
it better than MS - i lack one thing.

I lack a way to let people escape their own responsibilities.

Clients want security. So do consultants and consulting businesses.

The client want to be able to take your company to court if your product 
is bad. (Clients can sue the consulting company - but won't get much 
more than a bankrupt company....)
The consulting business wants to be able to take the software company to 
court if things go wrong. (This actor actually has NOWHERE to go if 
things go wrong. They assume full responsibility.)
The consultant also wants somebody to blame if his installation is going 
down the drain....

If you are an MS-partner you say: Well it's all Microsofts fault, but 
they will fix it in the next version. In the meantime please pay us to 
fix it. We don't know how much it will be, we don't know when it will be 
fixed. But MS is the worlds largest and most dominating SW company, and 
they don't want to make you angry, so you go away. So the best thing for 
you - dear client - is to stay with us, and MS software.

The client is reassured. He thinks - "well maybe I could get it all much 
cheaper in Open Source, but then my security would be gone..."

The consulting company is reassured. "Well - maybe we could get out of 
the firm grip of MS if we dared to, but who would back us up in case 
anything goes wrong?"

And the consultants go: "Well - i'll have a hell of a lot more career 
opportunities being a CMP - Certified Microsoft Professional, than 
trying to sell these nice little
Open Source Solutions. So I will not even dare to look that way, lest I 
see that it might not be those cheap little amateur projects I imagine, 
but rather full fledged solutions that are in some cases years ahead of 
Microsoft"

I have yet to come up with a way to break that spell.

Best
Gunnar Langemark




Michael Haggerty wrote:
> I would say the same thing if this wasn't coming from the person who makes
> the purchasing decisions and has to deal with the lawyers, the vendors, the
> IT guys, etc. FUD doesn't go away on it's own, and someone needs to be
> making the effort to educate others on it. Would be nice if someone had a PR
> budget to put together specific materials, reviewed by legal sources, that
> could be handed to a client or their lawyers.
>
>   
>>     
>
> Case studies and benchmarks are interesting, but limited in that performance
> is affected by a huge number of factors specific to the environment. Trellon
> is working on something a little more significant which I will talk about at
> another time.
>
>   
>> * may take a while....
>>
>> -Zack
>>     
>
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