A Brave Old World
I gotta say a little bit about the gig I've been on for the last month. Located in New Jersey, a major financial house has purchased tons of Red Hat technology, including JBoss, and has a large group of sharp folks that are working hard to get all this new cool software integrated into the corporation. It takes lots of testosterone, however.
They've got a web site that rumor says generates millions of dollars per week, and this site needs 100% uptime and high-SLA level responsiveness. I must say that Red Hat has the right stuff. All the way from RHEL 5, their flagship Linux enterprise product, to JBoss' new line of world-class application servers, this brave new company is adopting all the latest that open source can offer.
I think much of their bravery is due to a small group of empowered folks. For example, they've got this Architect there who isn't afraid at all of proposing lots of new cool stuff. Some might consider it rather risky, and the company has no doubt suffered some from being a ground-breaker, but I'm pretty impressed with how they have dealt with that risk. The main thing is that they don't suffer from the ridiculous crippling fear of new technology I've seen in other clients.
A good example of poor adoption ability is a company I'll call The Brown Company. TBC was a gig I worked on shortly in Atlanta. They've got an entire open venue of San Jose-like cool cubes to work in, and they make googles of cash from their clients by leveraging purchased software modules. A pretty brilliant business model. By many appearances, cutting edge place. Behind the guard desk, though, far from true.
When TBC hired me, they brought me in as a J2EE consultant to write a solution that essentially moved incoming EDI files from one system to another. I found some rather well-heeled open source software that would perform about 80% of the process we (myself and other team members) were to implement. I showed this really cool software to them, and my supervisor tells me, "we don't use open source". Notwithstanding their endemic use of Apache and other components that were clearly open source, it was my supervisor who didn't have the cahunas to make a decision to incorporate pre-built software code that would reduce development costs by 50% or better.
At TBC, it was folks with no guts that were valued. Instead of hiring people who can make logical decisions for the company, save the stockholders tons of expense, and better the company's brand, this firm values people who stop the process.
So kudos to my latest client. May they ever be. I like a company that values people who can make solutions happen.
And kudos to Red Hat. I am really enjoying working with them as a consultant. Instead of just teaching their new technology, I get to actually use it. Pretty neat.
They've got a web site that rumor says generates millions of dollars per week, and this site needs 100% uptime and high-SLA level responsiveness. I must say that Red Hat has the right stuff. All the way from RHEL 5, their flagship Linux enterprise product, to JBoss' new line of world-class application servers, this brave new company is adopting all the latest that open source can offer.
I think much of their bravery is due to a small group of empowered folks. For example, they've got this Architect there who isn't afraid at all of proposing lots of new cool stuff. Some might consider it rather risky, and the company has no doubt suffered some from being a ground-breaker, but I'm pretty impressed with how they have dealt with that risk. The main thing is that they don't suffer from the ridiculous crippling fear of new technology I've seen in other clients.
A good example of poor adoption ability is a company I'll call The Brown Company. TBC was a gig I worked on shortly in Atlanta. They've got an entire open venue of San Jose-like cool cubes to work in, and they make googles of cash from their clients by leveraging purchased software modules. A pretty brilliant business model. By many appearances, cutting edge place. Behind the guard desk, though, far from true.
When TBC hired me, they brought me in as a J2EE consultant to write a solution that essentially moved incoming EDI files from one system to another. I found some rather well-heeled open source software that would perform about 80% of the process we (myself and other team members) were to implement. I showed this really cool software to them, and my supervisor tells me, "we don't use open source". Notwithstanding their endemic use of Apache and other components that were clearly open source, it was my supervisor who didn't have the cahunas to make a decision to incorporate pre-built software code that would reduce development costs by 50% or better.
At TBC, it was folks with no guts that were valued. Instead of hiring people who can make logical decisions for the company, save the stockholders tons of expense, and better the company's brand, this firm values people who stop the process.
So kudos to my latest client. May they ever be. I like a company that values people who can make solutions happen.
And kudos to Red Hat. I am really enjoying working with them as a consultant. Instead of just teaching their new technology, I get to actually use it. Pretty neat.
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