Re: Cost of RDP

Having been in the chair that makes the decision to spend the money or not for the various development tools we used (both IBM i based and .Net based), and then track the performance against those purchases, I can verify that the productivity gains are worth the investment. While predisposed to allowing the spending (having put it in the budget in the first place) I also asked the development crew to make the case why they needed the tooling. I suspect that is the missing portion here. Make the case and even if it's not approved this year, it likely will make the budget for next year.

All that said, I wish IBM would come up with a licensing model that is less in the initial investment. A yearly subscription model (paid quarterly) that over 3 or 4 years would cost the same as the initial license plus software maintenance for the same period. More on the back end, less up front.

Jim Oberholtzer
Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects


On 7/4/2011 2:39 PM, David Gibbs wrote:

On 7/3/2011 11:45 PM, Joe Pluta wrote:

> Let's say just for a giggle that RDP saves you an hour a week (and I
> guarantee it saves me a lot more than that) over WDSC. That's 50 hours
> a year, give or take. So a quick divide tells me you consider your time
> to be worth about four bucks an hour. Yeah, I know that might be a bit
> over-simplified, but hopefully you get my drift. $800 just ain't that
> much as a one-time cost.

Joe ... while I don't disagree with your logic in the slightest ... it's been my observation that most management types (at least the kind that would deny the purchase of a RDP license) can't see that particular forest due to all the trees in the way.

A company I used to work for (a long time ago) refused to let the IT group purchase project management software until we got our current projects completed (oh yeah, they had a new requirement to add to the project in the same memo).

david