Extract from my new book:
As we know, the 1990s were a chaotic time for Russia as the Soviet Union’s centralized, defense - heavy infrastructure was gradually torn down and replaced by decentralized, commercial enterprises. Seth Ravin describes his work there blandly as “ defense conversion, ” but it was dangerous work where he faced kidnapping and death threats.
He is now into another type of conversion — going against what some would call today ’s “ evil empires"
This blog readers have, of course, heard about Seth, Rimini Street and low payback from software vendor maintenance dollars since one of its first posts in March 2005. Now, Gartner finally acknowledges it in the code of conduct for reasonable, predictable maintenance costs developed by its global IT council.
I would love to see Gartner put some teeth behind this code. Have the guts to call out IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and others as they violate those principles. Its analysts hear about them in client calls all the time. Here are some I cited in a recent article and Ray Wang discusses here. Gartner could easily anonymize the client names but share them with the world.
Not that I expect Reaganesque behavior from Gartner. Given these software vendors are also some of its biggest clients, the language will likely be ambassadorial and likely take years to show much progress. Better to have the "converter", Seth in tow...
