Re: Re: Re: SAS vs Perl?

[l2kashe]

I agree, but don't forget the flip side of the coin

What about the total cost in $x months/years? Is it worth spending the time and money now, as opposed to dealing with a product that you can't get under the hood of? What is their turn around time for bugs? Do the have a "forced" upgrade path, which you *must* follow in order to maintain your support contract? Do they end up providing Platnium service to a few of their customers, while the smaller shops have to deal with stuff as is? If you follow thier upgrade path, and need a new server, do you need a new licence? so on and so forth

I understand the framework you are coming from, and prefer if people dont really understand a problem space, that they go with a canned product, at least initially. But if the organization is fairly knowledgable about what they want (I can hear the groans), then doing in-house devel works out in the long run. The turn around time should be much much shorter on bugs and feature requests, even if instead of a true in house product, the organization maintains a business relation with a contractor who wrote the program. It really depends on how fast and or frequent changes occur to the core business practices and goals, and how this product ties into the scheme of things.

Just my 2 cents

use perl;

[waswas-fng]

I completly agree, his question infrenced that he already was thinking about the "other side of the coin" I was just stating that it may be worth while to look at the total cost for a home brew solution. On of the other things that may influence you on comercial product vs home brew is the transition path to new technologies -- many comercial apps will have competitors that offer migration tools to move to their products and new technologies -- on the other hand home brew solutions that have to migrate to new technologies leave your org holding the bag. as a referance here look at all of the legacy home brew systems in the corperate world today, many could have been kept up to date and talking with other current applications by sticking with purchased product. My whole point behind this is that you just have to weigh the whole cost/benefit for a decision like this -- it could go either way depending on the situation and org that you work for.

-Waswas