Comparing VS 2010 Pricing with IBM Team Concert

My bulk email this week included a message from the IBM developerWorks team with a link to their narrative about using IBM Team Concert as the hub for an organization’s software engineering process.  After last week’s analysis of VS 2010, I was curious if an apples-to-apples comparison between these two mega-vendors would turn up material price differences.

The Question: How does Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 pricing compare with IBM?

In last week’s model, I created baskets of Visual Studio products with ALM functionality for teams sized from 5 to 50 people.  This week I added baskets for IBM Team Concert at the same sizes.  I use public pricing straight from both vendors web sites.

I’ve changed the displays this week to compare price per seat, while last week I was showing my estimate of total costs per team.  I think this view is more useable when comparing vendors.

The IBM baskets were a little trickier to build.  For one thing there are more dimensions to their solution than Microsoft.  You can deploy Team Concert on open source infrastructure or you can choose IBM proprietary infrastructure.  In my analysis below I assumed a deployment to open source infrastructure, so there are no costs for WebSphere or DB2 built in to these comparisons.  This decision helps keep an apples-to-apples comparison. I ignored TCO, like the cost of servers and rack space, and maintenance cost.  Both IBM and Microsoft licenses come with one year of maintenance.

Again, like last week, I tried to be sensible with product mix in each basket.  You will get different values when you model your own choices and discounts, particularly in the small team sizes (and over 50!). If you’d like my Excel file feel free to contact me directly. If you tell me who you are and a little about your team and what you’re doing with ALM tools I’ll be happy to send it along.

Here’s the analysis.

Table 1:  Per Seat ALM Tooling Costs: Visual Studio 2010 and Team Concert

Figure 1: Per Seat ALM Tooling Costs: Visual Studio 2010 and Team Concert

From this analysis we see Microsoft’s announced VS 2010 pricing will be lower, except for teams less than five people, than IBM’s current pricing.  Remember Microsoft just announced their reduced price structure, before that, these comparisons would be close to equal.  Also, the apples-to-apples comparison applies only when you target Windows (irony of Windows as Apple not intentional!).  The IBM tools enable teams targeting multiple platforms and application frameworks including Linux , Java and Windows.  Visual Studio is for Windows only.

I propose two cost factors applicable to a general budgeting model are $1,300 for a seat of base developer tools and $5,550 for a premium seat.

Finally, the 4x price difference between base and premium products begs for deeper analysis, for either vendor.  Obviously, optimizing the blend of products will make a material difference in your overall spend.

For kicks, I ran out the analysis to larger team sizes, but the values I calculated for IBM pricing jumped so dramatically, I concluded I wasn’t getting an apples-to-apples comparison anymore.  I don’t want to speculate here why that is, but in your modeling you should be aware comparing deals over 50 seats requires modeling other considerations beyond the published pricing.

Build a model!

-k2

ALM Costs Going Down in Visual Studio 2010?

This week Microsoft provided preliminary pricing for its upcoming Visual Studio release, which Microsoft executives blogged to be March 22. The new packaging is a return to a small-medium-large model, and the 2010 names are Professional, Premium and Ultimate.  We knew this in the past as Standard, Professional and Enterprise.  Gone are products aimed at specific roles like Architect and Database Professional.

On first read, the document Visual Studio 2010 Packaging and Licensing Fact Sheet dated Oct. 19, 2009 made me suspect the US pricing was changing.  After a little Excelery, I believe the cost of ALM in 2010 products will be lower for most teams, substantially for some.

Here’s the analysis.

The Question: Does the cost for software licenses needed to outfit a team with ALM enabled development tools change from 2008 to 2010?

I chose to model a progression of team sizes: 5, 10, 25, and 50.  The mean and median sizes of teams tend to fall in this range.

For each team size, I define a basket of products that reasonably support that team.   Microsoft is making a significant change packaging Team Foundation Server with the desktop tools, so the contents of the baskets change between the two versions too.  Finally, I separate the baskets into two tiers, ALM Tooling and High-End Tooling.  The ALM Tooling includes core Visual Studio connected to Team Foundation Server with all team collaboration scenarios enabled.  High-End Tools add to ALM scenarios the special purpose tools like test impact analysis and code profiling.

I ignored TCO, like the cost of servers and rack space, and maintenance cost. Microsoft licenses come with one year of maintenance. I also ignored the upgrade promotions, assuming Microsoft is doing right by current customers.

I tried to be sensible with product mix in each basket and you may get different values when you model your own choices and discounts, particularly in the small team sizes. Mine is a simple model. I used the prices listed in the earlier linked document.  If you’d like my XLS file feel free to contact me directly. If you tell me who you are, a little about your team and what you’re doing with ALM tools I’ll be happy to send it to you.

Table 1:  ALM Tooling Costs with VS 2008 and VS 2010

Figure 1: ALM Tooling Costs with VS 2008 and VS 2010

Table 2: High-End Tool Costs with VS 2008 and VS 2010

Figure 2: High-End Tool Costs with VS 2008 and VS 2010

With this analysis, it looks like the cost of acquiring software licenses for ALM enabled Visual Studio is coming down.  Don’t be surprised to see Microsoft fine tune packaging and pricing before going final, so build a model to make it easier to keep track!

-k2

Certified Scrum Acolyte

Continuing my  ”Scrum Quest” this week, I just spent two days in Certified Scrum Master (CSM) training delivered by an excellent Scrum Trainer and Coach, Joe Little.  I’m enjoying the Agile kool-aid and believe in both its manifesto and principles.  But I worry that the title “Certified Scrum Master” overpromises and may diminish the real value of the starter course, or as Joe put it “feel the music” exercise.  You’re a certified Scrum Master when you participate in class and check the attendance sheet twice over two days.

Both Joe and his prepared materials (a deck mostly developed by Jeff Sutherland) were honest to position CSM training as a beginning step.  However, this doesn’t help the hiring public.  No one should believe that a two day course can teach enough skills or validate ability to lead the Scrum process on high performance development teams.  I believe the CSM title misleads.  After the two day course, many people in my section were going out to decorate their business cards with the new title. The keepers of the Scrum Alliance should fix this potential misperception.

There’s a simple solution, rename the course to say what it really produces:  Certified Scrum Acolytes.   Unfortunately, I think the Scrum Alliance may be taking another direction, and adding more hoops to the Scrum Master Certification with a formal certification exam to test applicants’ direct knowledge of Scrum techniques.  One can imagine eventual stupidity like, “How often does the daily Scrum meeting occur?”  A test is just another barrier to getting started.   It’s a queue for everyone to pass through and seems like waste, which is ironic, because Agile is the implementation of Lean Process:  the ruthless elimination of waste from all processes.

I don’t think the course needs to be changed, just the title.  In fact, I think the course is just right for certifying the interested and enthusiastic learner.  Two days of hands on exercise, working with a coach and learning with other likeminded people is a valuable use of time and worth marking.  As a hiring manager, I rank it above certifications that come from cramming a study guide and answering a bunch of arcane out-of-context questions that anyone can look up in five minutes.

The Scrum Alliance does have more credible certifications that require documented experience with Scrum, which are the Scrum Practitioner, Scrum Trainer, and Scrum Coach.   All measure actual documented practice. The people within the Scrum Alliance are doing great work by improving the way software is engineered through practical and positive technique. But,  they need to change  the name of the CSM course and certification.

-k2

The not so collocated team

I’ve been researching Scrum lately by tapping my gracious and experienced friends for interviews.  One pitfall I’ve heard a few times concerns the struggle to maintain cohesion and flow with contributors who work remotely.  This seems like a big problem for Scrum if it requires teams be present physically in the same room to accomplish true synergy.   Frankly, restricting the pool of talent to a geographical circle seems like a difficult local optimization and not one I believe product owners would choose just for the sake of Scrum.

This post is about one possible solution.

Last week I visited Mike Landau at SetFocus in Parsippany, NJ.  SetFocus helps smart IT people retool to get better jobs.  They do this with a catalog of intensive multi-week training courses, offering both full and part time options.  Mike showed me classes being delivered over a private video conference system called The Grid.  Instructors and students dial in for each class.  The displays had a Brady Bunch, nine box look.  So far, nothing exotic, this is a well worn path for delivering one to many lecture.  Gosh, I even remember Professor Tony Spiva delivering Econ lectures to my UT dorm TV back in the way back.

But here’s what I saw next.

As our conversation evolved over the two days, Jonathan Lefkowitz, SetFocus President, quickly and easily called adhoc meetings with his staff over The Grid.  For instace, with an instant message: “James, can you meet us on channel 88?”, and  a few clicks on the remote control to channel 88.  Boom, there’s James, in Florida, ready for 20 minutes of high bandwidth face to face conversation.

While I was touring the operations desk, Mike showed me another feature that turned my head.  Students can grab a channel, called a ” lounge”, to use for adhoc collaboration after class.

So I’m in New Jersey witnessing SetFocus staff from all over the country use video conference like they’re George Jetson.  Students are using it for all form of adhoc collaboration with classmates – like pair programming.

Now, I did time at Microsoft where we had a time-killer technology called LiveMeeting, a Windows desktop application like WebEx. It has a ton of features like pushing an update to you just as your meeting is about to start, and never quite synchronizing all the various projector, laptop, and video stream resolutions.  Every meeting that depends on a LiveMeeting (read collaboration with WW partners) spends the first 10 minutes in “AV fiddle time.” Never a good start when the goal is high bandwidth, positive, communication. The meeting begins with everyone annoyed.

So what’s the difference?

Modality.

The interface for The SetFocus Grid is delivered to a TV set, not a PC window. You recycle an old CRT TV for the display.  On top of the TV is a Polycom v500 video conference device providing video capture, CODEC, and output for high quality voice and video signal over the public IP network. You don’t need a dedicated circuit like my old Dr. Spiva days.  And here’s the trick:  uncoupling the PC from the video device puts each on equal footing on your desktop. It actually feels like the human to human interface has higher priority. You’re not navigating a cluttered Windows desktop where your view of a colleague is competing with your development environment, email client, and Firefox tabs.

A dedicated video solution is one possible path to improve day to day collaboration of Scrum teams with remote contributors. A modest investment widens the circle of talent you can include and reenforces the first tenet of the Agile Manifesto: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”.

And in extreme form, working remotely like this, it’s pretty green too.

Comments invited.

Atlassian and Marketing 101

The boys who bring us Jira are giving the industry a lesson executing marketing’s “Four P’s” this week. They’ve packaged their well regarded Jira and Confluence Products with a five-user starter license and Priced it at $5US. They’re Promoting the campaign for five days, pulling all the social networking levers for max viral effect. Ostensibly they’re raising money for Room to Read, donating all proceeds to the cause. But more cleverly, Mike Cannon-Brookes reports over 6,000 licenses issued in the first 48hours…that’s a run, and a new lesson in textbook marketing.

Well played guys, looks like fun.

-k2