You get what you pay for?

Over the holidays I had to do some repairs to my house. I’m somewhat handy, but there are lots of things I can’t do and/or don’t know how to do. The first job was to apply some caulk outside in zero degree weather. I bought the cheapest caulk gun at Lowe’s ($5.00) because a caulk gun is a caulk gun, right? WRONG! I spent 45 minutes in the brutal cold nearly injuring myself with the stupid cheap gun before I realized that I really, REALLY needed to change something. I went back to the store and bought the $15.00 gun. When I got back home, I was able to go at least 10 times as fast, with no fatigue at all with this more expensive gun. Lesson learned.

The second repair involved cutting a 3.5-inch hole in a pipe and a 5-inch hole in plywood. Lowe’s had individual hole saws for about $40, while Harbor Freight had a set of 5 different sized hole saws for $14.00. I bought the set from Harbor Freight and couldn’t be happier. I cut each hole in about 15 seconds. To satisfy my curiosity, I also bought one of the $40 hole saws to see if I could tell a difference with it. Nope. The $14.00 set works perfectly for my use case.

So do you “get what you pay for”? It depends on your needs. The cheap caulk gun was the absolute worst decision possible, but the opposite is true for the hole saws. Similar comparisons can be made in IT and all of technology. Sometimes the least expensive option will work brilliantly. Other times, taking the cheap route will cause a massive failure.

The Sales Pitch

How do you know the right choice to make in each situation? That’s something we at Gulfsoft Consulting can help you with. We have seasoned experts with decades of experience in hundreds of environments and all verticals. We know how to ask the important questions and how to interpret your organization’s needs to help come up with the right-sized solution that will work in your environment. More often than not, the right solution leverages systems and components that you already own, with just a small modification of the processes in place and the addition of the appropriate skills.

For example, most large organizations already own an Orchestration Platform (e.g. IBM Control Desk, ServiceNow, Jira, Salesforce, etc.). These platforms can easily integrate with other applications (like UrbanCode Deploy, Ansible, Puppet, etc.) via a REST API (or similar) call. This means that you already have the basis for nearly any kind of business automation that you need to perform. It just takes identifying the appropriate stakeholders, gathering the requirements, then implementing those requirements, and repeating the process. This is what we’re really good at. And as lifetime consultants, we provide detailed documentation so that your employees can take over the management and maintenance of the solution.

If you’ve got one or more IT problems to solve, get in touch and let’s talk about how you can immediately start to solve them.