Earlier this week rPath announced a "cost savings benefit" calculator. I thought I would take a look. After plugging in some generic values for costs, I took a look at exactly what savings you can expect. If you currently support just one operating system, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, there are no R&D and no additional revenue gains at all. According to rPath's own calculator, there are *NO* R&D benefits from just one OS. I found this interesting, because rPath on many occasions have indicated how much of a time savings benefit it is to use Conary. Now their calculator looks like its back tracking on that?
Their calculator shows a static 40% cost savings benefit on support. Whats interesting is that according to their calculator, the benefits of rPath do not scale beyond 8 support operating systems. So if you need to QA lets say 10 operating systems, there is no additional cost savings benefits.
This calculator is very questionable, it provides some nice numbers, but there is no explanation of the savings. Apparently, if you use rPath their calculator is claiming 15% or 16% increase in revenue. Perhaps it prints money? Its unrealistic, and doesn't appear to take into account the pricing program that rPath pushes on its customers.
It doesn't seem to take into account that real ISVs have to support legacy customers, so at any point in time, you might be supporting RHEL 4.x and 5.x, Fedora Core 6, 7 and 8, CentOS 4.x and 5.x, SuSE Enterprise, OpenSolaris, Solaris, Ubuntu Server, Gentoo and Debian.
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