03 July 2007

You don't always get what you pay for (IBM: $30m, 2 years; us: $3m, 1yr)

I just found out today, from the gentleman I did a consulting gig with a few years ago, that the company we did the architecture for (but who declined having us do the project), had IBM do it instead. That's not the interesting part (especially since during this time the company hired an ex-IBMer). The interesting part, as I was informed, is that IBM used our architecture (admittedly that's how it was explained, and we didn't get into details, but still), but took two years to do the project, and charged $30m!!! As I recall, we'd bid it at around a year, and I think around $2-3m! Either the project changed a lot, or that is just gross. I suspect IBM went in and did some massively overdone EJB implementation (this was a Java project, and I'd done a very basic prototype using Spring, Hibernate, and Velocity or JSP).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ouch. I've done these same sort of gigs as well and I'm always amazed when they go with IBM, Accenture, etc and pay 10x and get crappy results.

The end of the story is often for a sizeable project the company feels 'safer' going with a big player who will probably do a lousy job.

H4X said...

Yeah, bigger players, and sometimes people/company pay more for something, because they think they will get more. Happens all the time. Sorry to hear about your tragedy.