Nathan,
It *might* be less money to maintain down the road (haven't seen any side
by side comparison costs for a specific project). But here is how the
usual tech startup runs these days.
1. Use your man hours to create a minimum viable product. Low capital
because it can be done on a $500 PC that you have laying around.
2. Use the product to get some market traction. Serving can be as low as
$30/month to start.
3. Develop additional features based on customer feedback.
4. Scale out as needed with commodity hardware or cloud based VMs.
5. ???
6. Profit.
In fact the Profit part on SaaS apps can be as high as #3 in a lot of
scenarios with gross profit margins in the 30% to 60% of revenue range. I
would love to see an outline of an IBM i based app that can follow this
model. When it happens I'm all about it. But we aren't even close yet.
Not until the licensing model gets an overhaul. And it should get an
overhaul, its an old model that is being displaced by more customer
friendly and profitable models.
At any rate, we're a bit off topic here. The truth is that you should be
able to pick up any language without too much trouble. I agree that its
the domain knowledge that really holds the water. And really, these days
domain knowledge will get your a Project Manager job where you can spec
and delegate to less knowlegable code monkeys. Then, through experience,
they gain domain knowledge and the cylce continues.
Thanks
Bryce Martin
Programmer/Analyst I
570-546-4777
Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
08/11/2010 05:33 PM
Please respond to
RPG programming on the IBM i / System i <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Subject
Re: Future of RPG: What language would you learn?
From: Bryce Martin
its far more expensive to try and do some sort of SaaS solution
written in RPG+CGI hosted on i than it is to have it done in LAMP
on intel hardware.
That's a valid point. IT Jungle recently published an article about the
prohibitive cost of setting up a development box for hobby programming
under IBM
i. It takes a substantial investment:
http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh062810-story03.html
There was a lengthly discussion about it in the AS/400 Professionals group
at
LinkedIn. Although LAMP development requires relatively little up-front
investment, it's generally a lot more expensive to RUN and SUPPORT
thereafter.
Which would you rather have? Prohibitive up-front investment under IBM
i? Or
Prohibitive runtime and support under LAMP?
I'm kind of counting on somebody offering micro partitions on IBM i
servers for
developers, for a reasonable monthly/annual fee, to help those who may not
be
ready to make a big up-front investment in their own server.
I'm thankfully in a position to invest in a development box, and also in a
position to invest in new RPG development, without needing immediate ROI.
And
I'm willing to do that. We're expanding our product line, and working
toward
entering into a multi-million dollar market. But it's sometimes
discouraging to
be going against the grain, so to speak.
-Nathan.
midrange.com
