The Hidden Costs
Of ‘Free’ Pilots
Setup costs are another area to look out for. “Clients often get attracted
by cheap ongoing [service] prices, and do not see the sometimes high
[transition and integration costs],” Ridder says. For a service like email, he
cautions, these costs can easily be $10 to $30 per seat.
the maze of what versions [of] the operating systems
and databases would work,” Thirsk says. “It was [a]
matter of changing some code. It took some time
and effort to figure out exactly what lines needed to
be changed.”
Hidden costs can also crop up if applications
aren’t primed to take full advantage of the capabili-
ties of cloud computing.
“We made the assumption that the ERP programming was sophisticated enough to take advantage of
all the processors, memory, caches, storage devices
and network connections that the cloud configuration offered,” Thirsk says. But it wasn’t, and revising
the software code required a “considerable amount”
of application developer and systems programmer
time. “We have seen a 30% increase in performance,
but it wasn’t free,” he says.
Continued from page 24
Rent and Utilities
IT executives who move systems to the cloud might
encounter another unexpected cost if they suddenly
find themselves paying expenses that wouldn’t nor-
mally be their responsibility.
