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Success Stories
marc.slagle at online-rewards
Nov 30, 2004, 8:35 AM
Post #1 of 10 (10746 views)
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While the stories on the site are great, almost none of them make any
mention of the financial success of the project. They are very useful
in showing other developers what mod_perl has to offer, but are
difficult to use in convincing someone who only cares about "revenue
generation." If there is a way to go back and get the numbers on the
total dollar value of the orders run through the EToys system, it would
probably be a good bit of information to include. I only mention the
EToys article because I think most people would point to it as "the"
example that they would want to use in a conversation with management on
why mod_perl should be used.

I think that a lot of the time these stories are written by the
programmers, who are much more interested in proving that the
programming environment is superior (it is) than showing the financial
gains made by switching over. Perhaps a blurb reminding the author to
include as much information on the money made/saved by their
organization could be added to the bottom of the success story page
where the instructions for posting are.

Marc Slagle
Online-Rewards
2900 Jefferson Ave.
Cincinnati, OH 45219


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Re: Success Stories [ In reply to ]
frank at wiles
Nov 30, 2004, 8:42 AM
Post #2 of 10 (10347 views)
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On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 11:35:25 -0500
Marc Slagle <marc.slagle@online-rewards.com> wrote:

> While the stories on the site are great, almost none of them make any
> mention of the financial success of the project. They are very useful
>
> in showing other developers what mod_perl has to offer, but are
> difficult to use in convincing someone who only cares about "revenue
> generation." If there is a way to go back and get the numbers on the
> total dollar value of the orders run through the EToys system, it
> would probably be a good bit of information to include. I only
> mention the EToys article because I think most people would point to
> it as "the" example that they would want to use in a conversation with
> management on why mod_perl should be used.
>
> I think that a lot of the time these stories are written by the
> programmers, who are much more interested in proving that the
> programming environment is superior (it is) than showing the financial
>
> gains made by switching over. Perhaps a blurb reminding the author to
>
> include as much information on the money made/saved by their
> organization could be added to the bottom of the success story page
> where the instructions for posting are.

I've been thinking about writing a success story related to my day
job. Years ago we wrote a mod_perl application that handles all our
our cable modem provisioning (we're a cable ISP).

Our system handles all of the current and future versions of the
DOCSIS standard, runs on mod_perl/Apache/Postgresql, and has more
features than the commercial offerings. Most of the commercial
offerings that come close are in the $100k price range, ours cost
$6k in in-house development labor. Granted I've got a kick butt
mod_perl coder working for me, but it's still a nice success story
with some numbers.

I could also talk about all of the other projects we've done in
ISP automation, news paper publishing, cable, telephone, and online
publishing areas.

Anyone think this is a bad idea? If not I'll get something worked
up for the site in the next couple of weeks.

---------------------------------
Frank Wiles <frank@wiles.org>
http://www.wiles.org
---------------------------------


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Re: Success Stories [ In reply to ]
merlyn at stonehenge
Nov 30, 2004, 8:55 AM
Post #3 of 10 (10329 views)
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>>>>> "Marc" == Marc Slagle <marc.slagle@online-rewards.com> writes:

Marc> If there is a way to go back and get the numbers on the total
Marc> dollar value of the orders run through the EToys system, it
Marc> would probably be a good bit of information to include. I only
Marc> mention the EToys article because I think most people would
Marc> point to it as "the" example that they would want to use in a
Marc> conversation with management on why mod_perl should be used.

I also wish that some former Etoy-er (nudging Perrin) would *finish*
and *publish* the article that should have come out of EToys about
"why mod_perl".

Perrin, you know the one I mean, the study of *why* you chose mod_perl
there. With real hard objective numbers about performance and defect
rates and time-to-deploy.

--
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<merlyn@stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!

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Re: Success Stories [ In reply to ]
perrin at elem
Nov 30, 2004, 11:29 AM
Post #4 of 10 (10346 views)
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On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 08:55 -0800, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
> Perrin, you know the one I mean, the study of *why* you chose mod_perl
> there. With real hard objective numbers about performance and defect
> rates and time-to-deploy.

But... it wasn't like that. I doubt it ever really is. Technical
decisions at companies are either political or almost pure chance. They
are only rational on an individual basis. Open source adoption is often
driven by developers from within who demonstrate its effectiveness on
small projects until management can't say no anymore.

In the case of eToys, they used Perl because the two Cal Tech students
they hired to build the site liked it. Later, they ported some of it to
Apache::Registry in order to keep up with the load. When I joined, they
were trying to figure out how to gear up for the next Christmas season.
I took the job largely because they were already using mod_perl and
planned to do more of it.

- Perrin


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Re: Success Stories [ In reply to ]
perrin at elem
Nov 30, 2004, 11:45 AM
Post #5 of 10 (10361 views)
Permalink
On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 11:35 -0500, Marc Slagle wrote:
> If there is a way to go back and get the numbers on the
> total dollar value of the orders run through the EToys system, it would
> probably be a good bit of information to include.

Why would this be relevant? To show that people trusted real money to a
mod_perl system?

> Perhaps a blurb reminding the author to
> include as much information on the money made/saved by their
> organization could be added to the bottom of the success story page
> where the instructions for posting are.

The thing is, eToys didn't "switch" from anything, so how could you
reasonably say how much money was saved? Companies like IBM will be
glad to take as much money as you will give them, so you could say we
saved 300 million dollars, but it wouldn't mean much.

I think what you're looking for is what Craig McLane (of
Ticketmaster.com) does in his talks at conferences, where he discusses
how much they save by using open source. Check this one out:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7242

- Perrin


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Re: Success Stories [ In reply to ]
merlyn at stonehenge
Nov 30, 2004, 11:53 AM
Post #6 of 10 (10340 views)
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>>>>> "Perrin" == Perrin Harkins <perrin@elem.com> writes:

Perrin> In the case of eToys, they used Perl because the two Cal Tech
Perrin> students they hired to build the site liked it. Later, they
Perrin> ported some of it to Apache::Registry in order to keep up with
Perrin> the load. When I joined, they were trying to figure out how
Perrin> to gear up for the next Christmas season. I took the job
Perrin> largely because they were already using mod_perl and planned
Perrin> to do more of it.

Oh, then this was slightly before you? There was a study comparing
mod_perl to three other technologies for the "rewrite" of the site,
and was the reason mod_perl was chosen as the "new technology", not
just because you had legacy CGI-Perl-to-Registry usage.

I can't talk more about it, because I'm bound by NDA. :)

--
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<merlyn@stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!

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Re: Success Stories [ In reply to ]
perrin at elem
Nov 30, 2004, 12:05 PM
Post #7 of 10 (10321 views)
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On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 11:53 -0800, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
> Oh, then this was slightly before you? There was a study comparing
> mod_perl to three other technologies for the "rewrite" of the site,
> and was the reason mod_perl was chosen as the "new technology", not
> just because you had legacy CGI-Perl-to-Registry usage.

Oh, now I remember what you're talking about. That was later, when we
were preparing to rewrite for the next Christmas. We all wanted to use
mod_perl, but needed to make sure we weren't making a mistake, so we did
some basic benchmarks against Java servlets using Resin. The result was
that mod_perl came out slightly faster. I forget what else we tested;
there may have been a couple of other things.

- Perrin


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Re: Success Stories [ In reply to ]
frank at wiles
Nov 30, 2004, 12:08 PM
Post #8 of 10 (10348 views)
Permalink
On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 14:45:51 -0500
Perrin Harkins <perrin@elem.com> wrote:

> I think what you're looking for is what Craig McLane (of
> Ticketmaster.com) does in his talks at conferences, where he discusses
> how much they save by using open source. Check this one out:
> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7242

I wonder if Mr. McLane would be willing to write up a full article for
publication in a magazine and the website. I think this would help
lend some credibility to us. Maybe put it up on itmj.com as well?

---------------------------------
Frank Wiles <frank@wiles.org>
http://www.wiles.org
---------------------------------


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Re: Success Stories [ In reply to ]
marc.slagle at online-rewards
Nov 30, 2004, 1:05 PM
Post #9 of 10 (10308 views)
Permalink
Perrin Harkins wrote:

>On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 11:35 -0500, Marc Slagle wrote:
>
>
>>If there is a way to go back and get the numbers on the
>>total dollar value of the orders run through the EToys system, it would
>>probably be a good bit of information to include.
>>
>>
>
>Why would this be relevant? To show that people trusted real money to a
>mod_perl system?
>
>
I think a lot of people don't really trust perl for handling anything
critical. For some people I'm sure its the misconception that mod_perl
is just "cgi scripting". And I think the success stories show that
mod_perl is in a class of its own.

Including the information that $X million is run through the system in a
day/month/year would be more for the benefit of those who are not going
to be doing the programming. Sometimes it would help for a developer to
go to their boss and show them the "numbers." A lot of places where
I've worked the management wasn't interested in much else. If I had
pointed them to the success stories on the site, the response would have
been "It doesn't look like anybody is making money doing this."

We obviously can't point managers to a huge Microsoft or Sun site that
holds tons of articles and other materials that "prove" their solutions
are the best. I think we should maximize the impact the success stories
have on non-programmer types. I wasn't trying to pick out eToys for
doing something wrong, it was just an example.

Marc
Re: Success Stories [ In reply to ]
perrin at elem
Nov 30, 2004, 1:09 PM
Post #10 of 10 (10348 views)
Permalink
On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 16:05 -0500, Marc Slagle wrote:
> Including the information that $X million is run through the system in
> a day/month/year would be more for the benefit of those who are not
> going to be doing the programming. Sometimes it would help for a
> developer to go to their boss and show them the "numbers."

eToys is a good tech story, but business-wise, it went bankrupt. I
think Ticketmaster is the poster child you're looking for. If the
numbers in that article I posted weren't enough for you, you can
probably get more by contacting people there. The amount of money
Ticketmaster Online makes is a matter of public record.

- Perrin


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