Save and Conquer

I had a meeting with the heads of the information technology (IT) group of the company that bought our old company, which is now considered a subsidiary. They have good suggestions for how our subsidiary can integrate with the larger company network and applications. Unfortunately this comes with a recurrent price tag.

Just connecting to the global network will cost $40 per month per computer. They use switches and a router managed AT&T for the connection. That is approximately $48,000 per year. They also said that since the main company uses Lotus Notes, we should move to that. They were a bit flippant in that it would “only” cost $18 per user per month. The total cost will be $3,000 for a Lotus Notes server and roughly $12,000 licensing per year. There are also additional costs for VPN connections. I did not get a price but it is a per-connection cost. Basically anytime someone connects to the network from home or while on the road, there will be a charge.

So, just to get connected to the rest of the company, it will cost more than $63,000 per year. They also want us to re-route some of our wiring from a hot closet to another room. This will probably cost an additional $5,000.

All this will come out of our overhead. Something which the head corporate office has been watching closely. We also closely watch and try to keep our overhead costs down. We use lots of open source software at our company for exactly this reason. The IT guys were even a bit surprised at the amount of open source we use.

I think we will have to bite the bullet for the global company network connection charge which will also mean we incur the VPN connection charges, as well, but we will hold off on changing email and stay with the open source solution that works.

At the end of the day, the president of our subsidiary company was not happy.

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