[Info-vax] OpenVMS servers and clusters as a cloud service

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/1/2018 7:19 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 1/1/2018 10:45 AM, Kerry Main wrote:
>> A good example of a major company moving back to providing internal IT 
>> services with internal staff is General Motors (GM)
>> <http://www.autonews.com/article/20171002/OEM06/171009988/randy-mott-gm-it-architect> 
>>
>> <http://www.autonews.com/article/20170918/OEM06/170919754/gm-it-randy-mott> 
>>
>> - Sept 18, 2017
>> "Ten times more productivity. One thousand percent more data. Nearly 
>> 10,000 more employees.
>>
>> That's the result — so far — of an information technology
>> transformation that General Motors began in 2012, a massive effort to
>> undo years of outsourcing those increasingly critical functions and
>> rebuild them in-house from virtually nothing."

> They have dropped out-sourcing.
> 
> It happens.
> 
> Out-sourcing has potential for savings due to economies of scale
> and the side effect of moving more work from on-shore to off-shore.
> 
> But there is always a long way from potential savings to
> actual savings.
> 
> Based on the article it sounds like the reason behind the
> switch was not lack of cost savings but lack of innovation.

Note that I think this is an increasingly common reason
not to out-source or in-source-back-again.

There is a huge push in these years from business on
IT to become more agile/flexible in rolling new
things out.

This favor cloud (both public and private).

But it also favors in-house over out-source.

Those traditional multi-year out-sourcing contracts
with SLA's, penalties, pricing models, bi-weekly
status-meetings are poison for agility.

Instead of waiting 2 months to get hardware delivered and
setup to run 200 Hadoop nodes, then you can spin them up
in AWS in 2 hours.

But if it takes 2 months to get your out-sourcing partner
to take on the operational responsibility at an acceptable
price (because Hadoop cluster context did not match the
contract made 4 years ago), then the cloud benefits
are lost.

Arne