RE: "Webulating" RPG/ programmer tools

["Ari B. Samson" <ari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kathleen,

You wrote about consultants providing their own tools and is this a trend? The 
area I can talk about is the Obsydian tool from Synon. This tool has a 
reasonably expensive per seat license. Some clients are much more interested in 
hiring a consultant who can walk in with a hefty laptop that a)actually already 
has the tool and the license and b) is powerful enough to run efficiently with 
the tool. It takes at least a pentium 133 with 64 megs of memory to even begin 
to get good results. Not to mention the network cards and other acoutrements. 

Now this is one specific case, and I think it is a bad precedent for 
consultants. Supplying this could easily be $12,000. On the other hand, if the 
company wants the consultant to work on the project they have to automatically 
add that same amount of money to buy the equipment and software themselves. 
We've come a long way from the time when all we needed was to set up an 
additional terminal.

application/ms-tnef