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Comment by collingreen | Hacker News Reader

Now imagine you save $10M a year doing it

> Now imagine you save $10M a year doing it

only after the move is complete and assuming it's as successful as you think it would be. What usually happens is the migration takes on a life of its own and is a multi-year if not multi-decade project. It sucks up so much money and effort that a business could be using to actually build their business vs migration to a different database. Meanwhile, the account execs of the old system know you're moving off of it so say good bye to any kind of contract discounts or special treatment during emergencies.

There's entire graveyards of failed enterprise system migrations. The most likely outcome is eventually a compromise has to be made and now you have two systems to maintain and license, the legacy one, and the new one. With the promise of eventually getting off the old one but it never happens.

I'm on a project with a client that has 24 ERPs across their enterprise around the globe from acquisitions. Half of them are ERPs that were meant to replace another one but the transition was never completed. A big part of this project is integrating all of their sales pipelines, analytics, and history into, yet another, enterprise system.

That's absolutely true. Is also true for most projects in general though so pretty standard.

It’s rarely that clean. Sure, there is the immediate sticker price, but you have to factor in the migration costs as well. Depending on how deep the integration goes, it could take years of effort. All of which is going to take political capital to get people to migrate perfectly working systems without any operational gain. Plus you have the old guard who actively fight you-maybe they have spent their career in Oracle and that is all they know.

Even if you do move mountains and make it happen, suddenly any outages after the transition become your fault. “This never happened on the old system.”

True words. I've seen this technique used to force people to think realistically. It goes like this (example):

- Is it possible for a 3 person team to manage 1000 distinct Kubernetes clusters?

- No way in hell!

- What if we hypothetically pay you $2M salary each?

- Well, let me think about it, we could figure this out...

How is that realistic? If you offer me insane money, I will of course bluster that I can do the impossible. When I inevitably fail, I still have a pocket full of cash.

It's not realistic, money doesn't make hard things easy. Paying someone more doesn't make them more capable, at best it an incentive to work longer/harder. That doesn't make them more capable either, it just makes them work more. If someone asked me to swim the English Channel I'd say no because i can't do it. If someone offered me $2M to do it i would still say no. Let's say i said "yes, i'll figure something out.", well i would still drown or need to be rescued even after being paid $2m.

Just write Kubernetes for Kubernetes to manage the kubernetes. duh

That's a joke. but unironically you could manage 1000 Kubernetes clusters with automation. why not?

use ChatGPT for Kubernetes

You are right, that's exactly my point. I was in such situation multiple times. People will say "it's impossible" but they actually mean "it's impossible given my motivation connected to money, time I could be given, freedom to experiment without boss looking at the calendar, and probably a bunch of other things". When the same people are given sudden motivation kick (even as a hypothetical) they start to actually think. Maybe they'll figure out that it's impossible anyway and won't do it for a $100M. Myself, I'd immediately start to think how to do it.

Once upon a time, our team was paying Oracle $6 million a year in DB licenses alone. We ended up building our own bespoke storage solution.

Now imagine the switch is going to cost you $100M in downtime and change consultants, if it succeeds at all, and your new provider will up the price in a few years time anyway.

Then just don't migrate to MS SQL but to Postgres

Big enterprise businesses want support contracts for someone to blame. Yes, you can find Postgres support, but switching to a different devil is the far more common option.

"just"

That's about how much it cost my company to move the flagship off of z/OS. That kept the language (Cobol) and DB2 intact (moved to DB2LUW); just a new build target basically.

It took like 5 or 6 years and that $10M represents the cost of only 10 months of operations on Z.

It's not really going to benefit ME anything. It will benefit my employer this amount. I might get an extra bonus for successful migration, but it's peanuts compared to the savings.

So in such situation, I'd be tempted to actively oppose this initiative.

Now imagine you risk breaking $100M in order to save $10M.

Imagine you think you save… You only save after you have paid…

Why would any Enterprise Software vendor leave $10M on the table?

Lack of capability, mismanagement, misinformation to name a few

Because vendors are not fungible in the eyes of the buyer.

Just not that straightforward in practice. You have all of these product lines that people are building that you're hoping will grow the business. They all depend on your backend stuff that's just an implementation detail. You have to somehow convince everyone across the org to stall their product development to perform a "migrate to Postgres" thing? It's not going to be easy.

There was a recent big company that posted on Twitter about "shutting down our last Oracle server" and that was the last thing in a multi-year process or something like that.

Coordination is sometimes harder than the technology itself.

The assertion was that switching vendors would save $10M. I asked why the new vendor would forego $10M that the old vendor was able to collect. Are you saying that the new vendor has to offer this discount otherwise there’s no incentive to migrate? (I agree that migrating is very difficult politically.)

So you did, I did not pick up that you meant peer vendors which is pretty obvious on re-reading. I believed you were saying that Enterprise Vendors (who are often Oracle customers) would jump to save $10m. But that wasn't what your question was.

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