Re: Help to Promote Linux! - Economics....

Greg wrote: > Just fer sport (and I really don't have a preferred side here...), how > do you all see the economics of Informix on Linux working? All of the > Linuxes I'm aware of (and I'm nobody's expert here either...) are > inherently uniprocessor machines, mostly PC's. So basically, we're > talking the lowest end, most price sensitive segment of the market. > > How does Informix in it's questionable financial state, do Linux ports > and support them even minimally, when it's having problems with the big > dollar industrial strength market?? So even though the modest number > of us who know and like Informix for bigger jobs might like to have > something similar to put in the East Boofoo field office to work with, > Informix would have to sell a jillion of them at $100-$300 a copy to > make it work economically, and that's just hard to see (unless microsoft > buys 'em out - ooooooo there's that nasty rumor again...). Personally, > I don't think theres a big enough market for a really heavyweight > database running on toy hardware. > > That's just my opinion, of course, I could be wrong. Well, if we really wanted your opinion, we would have given you one. (Ooop! Sorry, that's the from the Bill Gates book on product marketing!) All kidding aside I think I can answer you on this one. Lets look down the road of life in the big company. You need to consider distributed data throughout the organization. You need to do this in a cost effective manner. Meaning that you want the solution which is not only optimum but also delivers the lowest TCO or total cost of ownership. Now lets look at MicroSloth. Its everywhere, but to buy a 10 connection license of NT server, you are talking about $1,000.00 ( The lowest I've seen it was $749 for NT 4.0). Of course your mailer and other *free* items we find in UNIX will be missing or so crappy that you have to buy better ones. Yet I digress. Earlier released information has a NT 5.0 and SQLSever being priced out at 10K a box. Of course Informix runs on NT, and Sells for what $1500 at the intraware site? So the cost of Informix on NT is approx. $2500 - 3000 cause you may need some extra goodies. Now lets look at the other options. There is SCO, Solaris, Linux, etc... These all have a price tag of $1-2K depending on the options. With Informix costing around the same. (Check out the pricing at intraware.) So you are still looking at the software to be around 2500- 3500 depending on options. Of course we haven't talked about the actual hardware so lets assume that it is all the same. The TCO for Linux is always going to be better, even if the price were the same for the informix. You are saving the 1K to 2.5K that you don't have to buy in the OS. Over 100 or more sites, that's a lot of money. As far as the issue of support and other things, well, lets just say that those issues too can be handled. ;-) -Mikey