Re: in-house development versus packaged solutions

"Ray Porter" <ray_porter@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:48178c80$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I know how I feel but I'd be interested in seeing what others in this
forum think.

Hi Ray,

I think Kevin has a good point, in that it depends on the system's intended
purpose. My experience with very specific purpose-driven systems, in our
case flight test data acquisition systems, has been that we were much better
off developing the hardware and software system in-house. The off-the-shelf
systems available required so much customization to suit our specific needs,
and didn't come with source code but modifiable configuration data, that it
would have been more expensive to try to force those systems to fit our
needs than to develop our own from scratch. Not to mention the fact that in
the end we would have been left with a system that really didn't do
_exactly_ what we needed done. I don't know the numbers, but I suspect that
over the life of the system, the hardware/software/developer costs were in
the $5 million range.

Other systems that are more standardized, horizontal market products, like
accounting-type software, may be much easier to use off-the-shelf with mods.
I've never worked with that sort of thing, so don't have any relevant
experience to draw from.

Best of luck!
Van Swofford
Tybee Jet Corp.


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