Re: Oracle and PICK

If you look _at_ TCO for an installed solution, obviously there are certain TCO elements that would remain constant. If you have a site with, say, 500 PC workstations deployed across the country running Win2K & XP, then the infrastructure & support costs with ANY solution will be more or less constant

(OK, so Nick would deploy "green screens" rather than PC's, so users will not stuff up windows, there will be less time lost with "futzing", and fewer moving parts so one would assume less failures --> but lets discount that Nick !)

So, to simplify the calculation, lets assume we are dealing with a centralized server running some *nix variant (or Windows if you prefer!)

The calculations should be fairly straight forward - we are dealing only with cost of acquisition of hardware & software [not applications - I've already pegged those as constant for this example, but if Nick is able to sell a solution at 1/4 the price of an Oracle based solution, that obviously WILL have an impact on acquisition costs !], ongoing maintenance (including care & feeding of the DB environment).

For the sake of this exercise, maybe consider a "hypothetical" application of reasonable complexity that contains around 1,000 tables.

Should we add in development costs for, say, making enhancements to the base system on an annual basis, as this is also an important aspect of TCO ? For the sake of my example, could we assume we are extending the base system "somehow" (each year) by adding, say, 24 additional tables (2 a month may be excessive) with 10-20 fields each, enhancing 50 existing screen based processes, creating a similar number of new screens, and likewise amending & creating 50 reports.