This is more of a general question about which direction would be a better investment for the company.
Our company’s core business application is written in Visual FoxPro and is about 9+ years old. The database is huge 15+ gigs and the core logic is complex and to make matters worse the data model is terrible. The two guys that built it and have maintained it all these years are at least in their 50’s, so needless to say retirement or possibly death could come within the next decade or so.
This VFP app drives all our core business functions and requires terminal services and citrix to access it from the outside world. Our web apps have to interface with it via ODBC and we are always having performance issues with it. The servers that run this system are also very old, like Win 2000 server and are falling apart.
Recently we have been having meetings about upgrading the systems that run this core app as well as other services like email and file storage. The biggest expense however is buying new server hardware, OS licensing, Terminal Services licensing, Citrix licensing etc to solve some performance and outside access issues we are currently having as well as just generally bringing us to date on our systems.
The price tag is going to be in the $55K to $65K price range. So as a web developer my point of view is that this is a huge waste of money! My solution would be to invest that money in rewriting the core system to run on the web based .Net platform. This would eliminate the need for Terminal Server and Citrix licensing along with the pricey hardware and configuration management to run it on. I don’t see the point in investing this kind of money in an antiquated system that should be on it’s way out anyways.
I am looking to get some convincing arguments as to why this is a waste of money. Hopefully there is someone here that has faced this type of situation before that can give me some points of view. The hardware upgrade seems to be the easiest road to take because they will just have a consultant come in and do it all. A software development project would take longer, require more resources and possibly cost a little more money.
Every project needs a cost-benefit analysis. If a $60,000 one-time investment will resolve all issues for the next 10 years, then it is (probably) far more economical than hiring a team of developers for even one year to build a newer, better system.
On the other hand, if it’s already costing $50,000/year in maintenance and this capital cost is just to keep the system alive, and you’ll need to spend another $60k in a few years from now, then it warrants a serious consideration with respect to a re-design.
Or you could take the middle road and start wrapping it up in something opaque like a web service, then gradually swapping out components with better (more efficient, more maintainable, etc.) internal components. Lots of companies go this route because it defers the up-front costs of a rewrite; if necessary you can defer IT resources elsewhere.
S.Lott is right, though – it’s likely that you won’t be able to compete on cost alone. You have to try to quantify the risks associated with these ancient systems – for example, how much it will cost the company to find and train qualified FoxPro developers if the original programmers decide to quit (or, to use the parlance of so many managers I’ve met, “run over by a bus”)…
Just to add some further perspective to this: Before .NET (and for a few years after) I conducted most of my projects exclusively in Delphi. At the time, it really was a great choice for enterprise development. I was actually the person who didn’t want to “upgrade.” After a while, however, it became apparent to both myself and my higher-ups that this scared people outside the company.
Investors, auditors, everyone – they didn’t like the idea that our core IT asset was done in some “obscure” language. Of course, Delphi wasn’t/isn’t really that obscure; there’s a “delphi” tag here on SO with a count of 3340. But let’s use SO as our example – here are the current counts:
c#– 57293.net– 30577asp.net– 26600java– 31023vb.net– 5996delphi– 3340foxpro– 69vfp– 27Let those numbers sink in for a while. Delphi, my tool of choice at the time, now has less than 10% of the representation of C#, and this made non-techies nervous. Foxpro/VFP is not even at 1%. I can’t even remember how many times I had to answer questions like:
Blah blah blah, worry worry worry, was how I felt at the time, and this was a product that wasn’t really that obscure. In your case, we’re talking about FoxPro here. FoxPro has gotten to be almost like COBOL; sure, it’s still around, there are people out there who know it, but who starts a new project in FoxPro today? It’s boring, it’s downright ghetto. VB6 is starting to become ghetto, and VB/Access effectively replaced FoxPro so many years ago.
I’m obviously being slightly melodramatic here, but if I were you, this is the angle I would be taking. Forget about the short-term economics, forget about the age, and focus on the obscurity of the product. How many genuine, qualified responses do they think they’ll get if they put a want-ad out for a FoxPro developer? What kind of pay would they have to offer for a position like that? What would the turnover be like? This may all seem remote if these two developers have been there for 20-odd years, but when you’re running a multimillion-dollar business, you ought to know that it’s never a good idea to stake your very survival on one or two employees – not if you can help it.