End-To-End

 
First of all I apologize to all my readers for not writing in a while, we had a very busy 4th quarter. One of the things we did was to participate in the CMG conference in Vegas. Well Vegas was great – I’m the kind of guy that takes pride in losing money, since that means I played and played. If you turn out winning, it just means you were not playing enough, doesn’t it?

Few things I found out during the conference:

  • There are a lot of Mainframe guys out there, still. And I think that all of them where in Vegas during that week.  I wonder if it raises the insurance cost for such events. Just imagine what will happen, if God forbid, something bad happened to the conference attendees. These mainframe guys – they handle the most critical applications in the US!
  • Almost all of them have the title “capacity and performance manager”. Strange, I thought that when it comes to MF, there are no performance and capacity problems. That’s the whole idea with MF, isn’t it?
  • 80% of any conference attendees are there for the giveaways.  The first one to create a conference which is just for giveaways – will make a fortune!

All the different vendors had this big statement: “we can provide End-To-End visibility”. Funny, none of them have a real end-to-end transaction tracking product. So after a lot of thought I understood what they REALLY meant: “We can sell you different stuff for your entire topology  (‘end-to-end’) but it will be a different product with no integration whatsoever for every different tier in your topology – product A for your user experience, product B for your app server, product C for your database, and product D for your network…”

They will talk to all the different IT departments (‘end-to-end’), try to sell you an expensive and long term site license (‘end-to-end’), and then make you pay them for every hour of integration and installation (‘end-to-end’), and after you have a bunch of them working for you daily for months on different implementation projects (‘end-to-end’) you’ll find yourself in pretty much the same place you were before, only without of a budget for products that can actually help.

End-to -End, yea…