% fortune -ae paul murphy

Costs Relative to Client-Server

This section introduces the three cost scenarios to be used throughout the text and explains the idea that a big organization, like an FAA or a Fortune 5,000 company, consists of islands of IT opportunity that can't simply be forced into a single mold but have to be transitioned at different rates and different times depending on the people in place at the beginning.

Thus the example scenarios involve:

  1. a 500 user faculty system;

  2. a 5,000 user manufacturing company with three major sites; and,

  3. a 30,000 user international professional firm with about 500 offices.

Each cost comparison looks at cost issues relative to the Microsoft client-server alternative with respect to capital, maintenance, support, networking, telecom, HVAC, and business risk.

In addition each scenario will be discussed with respect to: