Courtesy of Dennis Howlett I found Vantelo. More about Vantelo later, but courtesy of them I found this Aberdeen report - free - on the Oracle site. It is titled The Total Cost of ERP Ownership.
It is chockful of cost data for ERP software and implementation services. But even as it advises "Don't fall in to the trap of believing an ERP implementation is ever done" its definition of TCO probably covers the first 1-2 years of lifecycle cost. If you can find a service provider which does implementations at less than software cost. Only for larger companies does the implementation cost exceed (marginally) the software cost. Then you got to add maintenance. Training. Upgrades. Hosting. And much more.
As I wrote here "So, even without factoring in costs of your own staff or incremental hardware you are looking at $7.50 at the low end and $ 21 (or more) at the high end for every $ 1 dollar of software license costs." Nowhere in Aberdeen's report, as they slice and dice data by vendor, size of customer did I see more than 1.5x factor compared to base software costs. May be Aberdeen should get in to the ERP program management business if they can deliver that dramatic an improvement.
But even at Aberdeen's modest TCO estimates (and Forrester's numbers that I wrote about here) on-premise software looks amazingly bloated compared to SaaS offerings. For an enterprise between $ 50 and $ 100 million. the cost per user is $ 8,800. Is Larry trying to help NetSuite before its likely IPO by publicizing this free on the Oracle site?
Which brings me back to Vantelo. They scour vendor sites to find free analyst reports for their readers, and then sell those eyeballs via Google ads to other tech vendors (and to analysts like Gartner!). It is a useful service, but you cannot avoid thinking of the marketing dollars flowing through that ecosystem of analysts and vendors and their ultimate impact on software TCO.
And I am bummed - cannot understand why Oracle would not link to my blog and my TCO calculations when it is available for free -)
