An organisation`s choice of database will have a fundamental and enduring impact on the total cost of ownership (TCO) of its applications. This can lead to a negative or positive TCO over a three- to eight-year period, with a dramatic swing possible either way.
This was the report from John McCormick, COO of InterSystems, the post-relational database vendor holding Cach'e Devcon 2002, its annual user get-together in Orlando, Florida.
Reporting on research conducted by market intelligence company KLAS Enterprises, McCormick said that over an eight-year period of ownership, KLAS had reported a $15 million positive payback for InterSystems` Cach'e, and a -$1.2 million negative return for Oracle.
KLAS produced a report based on in-depth interviews with 110 healthcare IT executives, measuring real-world satisfaction with healthcare applications based on InterSystems and Oracle: "Cach'e rated better than Oracle in every satisfaction measurement," says McCormick.
The survey had as a base, interviews with executives running four well-known applications: two on Cach'e, two on Oracle. Some of the findings were illuminating. For healthcare IT executives, reliability was easily the greatest difference between the two databases: 60% could not remember when last Cach'e went down. Secondly, it was faster on any performance metric, and supported 210% more users on similar hardware.
When it came to support, Oracle needed 2.5 times as many DBAs as Cach'e, and Cach'e delivered richer applications, better performance and economics, despite much more intensive use than Oracle. All of this translated to an average cost of $7 750 per user per year for an application running on Cach'e, relative to $11 500 per user for an application on Oracle.
The costs, as McCormick rolled them out, told a tale: ongoing staff costs per year were $450 000 for Cach'e, and $950 000 for Oracle.
All of this translated, over a five-year period, to cost of ownership of $10.45 million for Cach'e and $16.7 million for Oracle.
"Spending an extra 60% on technology is not fiscally responsible," McCormick quipped.
McCormick next focused on speed of application development, an area where InterSystems specialises with its RAD (rapid application development) approach.
"RAD is why VARs choose InterSystems," said McCormick. "Most people use it for this purpose, for lower development costs, so as to deliver better applications sooner, with a better fit and narrowing of the gap between pragmatic and ideal solution, and reduction and elimination of requirements creep."
Smaller teams
But above all, RAD means smaller teams, which in turn means higher efficiency. "Each developer adds overhead, which means reduced efficiency the larger the team," McCormick reported.
For instance, the most productive team, running at 100%, is a developer on his own. Two developers running together yield 95%; five operate at an average of 82%; 10 at 63%; 15 at 49%; and 20 at 38%. "This makes nonsense of the assertion that you can throw money or bodies at a problem," noted McCormick.
RAD is also more inclined to deliver against business need, as there is less chance of requirements slipping, and of the application being delivered while the business can still take advantage of market opportunities.
Cach'e also scored in being deployed over a longer period: "Longer application life means avoiding the cost and pain of replacement, which erodes return on investment."
It was the replacement of Oracle over an eight-year period that really undid its overall value relative to Cach'e, as reported by InterSystems: while Cach'e will run for eight years and longer, the Oracle system will need replacing, based on market experience. The overall figures yielded are $28.8 million benefit for Cach'e, relative to $13.8 million in costs; and $26.3 million in benefits for Oracle, relative to $27.5 million in costs.
"The true measure of a solution is its performance in live operation," notes KLAS. "The data is in and the measurement has been taken. When we cut through all the hype about technology, state-of-the-art solutions, object-oriented systems, relational databases and client/server, we can see that InterSystems databases continue to serve the healthcare community as a core component in the best rated systems in the market."
"What this translates to for customers is risk reduction," concluded McCormick. "Customers are faced with real risks with major applications: It doesn`t work; it doesn`t keep up with changes in the business; and it doesn`t scale as your business grows. How they mitigate that will be driven in part by their choice of database."
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