Cost centers, revenue centers and politics in a cross organization world

time to read 2 min | 394 words

Sometimes we get requests from customers to evaluate and help specify the kind of hardware their RavenDB servers is going to run on. One of the more recent ones was to evaluate a couple of options and select the optimal one.

We got the specs of the two variants and had a look. Then I went and took a look at the actual costs. These are physical machines, and the cost of each of the options we were given, even maxed out, was around 2 – 3K $.

One of the machines that they wanted was using a 7,200 RPM hard disk and was somewhat cheaper than the other. To the point where we got some pushback from the customer about selecting the other option (with SSD). It took me a while to figure out what was going on.

This organization is using RavenDB (and the new machines in question) to run their core business. One of the primary factors in their business in the speed in which they can serve request (for that business, SEO is super critical metric). This business is also primarily focused on getting eyes on the site, which means that their organizational structure looks like this:

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And the behavior of the organization follow the money. The marketing & sales department is much larger and can steer the entire organization, while the tech (which the entire organization depends on) is decidedly second string, for both decision making and budgeting.

I have run into this several times before, but it took me a long while to figure out that in many cases, the result of such arrangements is that the tech department relies on other people (in this case, us) to tell the organization at large what needs to be done. “It isn’t us (the poor relation) that needs this expensive (add 300$ or so) add on, but the database guys says that it really matters (and you’ll take the blame if you don’t approve it)”.

I don’t have anything to add, I’m afraid, I just wanted to share this observation. I’m hoping that understanding the motivation can help alleviate some of the hair pulling involved in those kind of interactions (yes, water is wet, and spending a very small amount of money is actually worth it).