I field (too) many calls at work from vendors trying to sell my company web "Solutions" ... typically $50K to $200K packages (over)promising all sorts of Wonderful Things related to personalization / CRM / tracking / etc. Usually I end these calls quickly due to concerns about cost / integration / track record / scalability /etc.

Today, talking to Yet Another Salesman in this realm, was pleasantly suprised to hear him stress his firm's use of Perl and OpenSource tools as key advantages to their product. First sales call regarding Big Web Software Products where I've heard Perl mentioned... cool.

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RE: perl as a selling point
by clemburg (Curate) on Nov 02, 2000 at 00:11 UTC

    Check out Imperia to see a Perl based content management system that is commercially sold (price range approx. 5k US$ to 50k US$, depending on configuration and options). With over 200 installations this is the biggest web-based online content management system in terms of market share in Germany.

    A lot of major clients buy this system (and not something else) because they get all the source code with it automatically, and thus are independent of vendor policies when extending or interfacing the system.

    This open-source-by-nature characteristic of Perl is one of the biggest selling points for Perl in the "large systems" category, IMHO. And this is definitively recognized by clients. It's probably just that your average Perl fan is so opposed to doing "business stuff" (as in "I'm a Hacker - they are Managers"), that a lot of commercial opportunities for Perl are missed due to communication problems.

    BTW, the software for one of the worlds largest electronic stock markets (Germany's XETRA system) uses Perl to do all the controlling and configuration stuff - they got too tired of reprogramming Unix shell in Win32 batch language :-).

    Christian Lemburg
    Brainbench MVP for Perl
    http://www.brainbench.com

RE: perl as a selling point
by cianoz (Friar) on Nov 01, 2000 at 21:34 UTC
    usually the question i ask to salesman in this situaton is:
    why should i buy your web solution when i can roll out my own so easy with perl and with all the flexibility i need?
    some times it takes more time to customize a proprietary solution than write one from scatch (expecially when you have so good building blocks..)
      I agree with you cianoz, but not with your choice of the word "easy." For a big ecommerce site, the build vs. buy thing usually isn't about cost... "rolling our own" could mean a team of 3 or 4 engineers for 3 or 4 months... 3/4 of an web wizard FTE isn't cheap or easy... and then there's ongoing maintenance... no matter how you do it, it never turns our cheap or easy....

      The question isn't "Which is easiest", but rather "Which causes the least pain and agony"...
      :)
        I honestly believe that you can do most things with freely available software.
        Where I work, we have one guy doing e-commerce dev work using a freely available e-commerce app.
        Check out: Interchange.
        This seems to cover most needs. As for cost, you'll need one person working on it, maybe two.. And it scales very nicely thank you.. :)
        And to add to the bonus, it's GPL!

        Malk.
        "well, that depends on..."

        the problem is not only that you get a solution, but also to make that fit to your needs. So whether your own programmers do these modifications while using modules or other scripts or somebody elses ones do, you woun't get rid of the needs to add to it, to maintain it, to always develope it further.
        There it seems to be a greta advantage to get an solution first that is open to these modifications. Well with perl it is. But these salesmen wan't to sell a product, ok sometimes also service, but thats a minority I guess.
        And while selling a product doesn't imply do give out carbon copies of the construction plan I think thats with most other things as they change know, it's got to be approved that you can still can live from your work, even though in another way than just putting it to the shelf in the store. :-)

        Have a nice day
        All decision is left to your taste
      You just have to know that salesmen hate people that can think a logical thought like the one you just expressed!

      Roy Alan