Mark Pennycook & Bill Trim of Company-I & I had dinner at The Don restaurant in the City today. We were just catching up, discussing business, organisational issues and red wine. The sommelier was very helpful and while some may sniff at our choices, we drank a Chateau Malescot Margeaux ’99, a Yarra Yerring Australian Pinot Noir, an Australian Noble One Reisling and finished the meal with a couple of glasses of Sandymans 1963 Port. I started with a tuna salad, went on to duck and finished with a Raspberry & Vanilla mouse. As Mark said, fun, illuminating, thought provoking and fucking expensive! Just like a good city lunch should be!

pouring the red

One of intellectual high points was the observation, “Companies compete by managing their applications portfolio”, an IT service company must be able to talk about applications, unless it wants to be trapped in a cost minimisation conversation, in which it must come off worse; it’s always going to be cheaper to do something on wages rather than fees. Actually is this true? Why are fees so much more than wages? Does it represent labour market risk, or scarcity? Or could it be a premium for expertise & knowledge? Visible valuations for knowledge are hard to find and the economics of knowledge is equally not well understood. This is definitely a conversation to be continued.

ooOOOoo

Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, republished here in Feb 2016.

Wine & Wisdom
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One thought on “Wine & Wisdom

  • 10th August 2018 at 7:07 pm
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    The comment on the need to talk applications as a service company is something that my last five years at Citihub reinforced. They embraced it by addressing applications engineering risk in their availability audits, they side stepped it by specialising in compliance engineering and IT Risk GRC and took small steps towards it by embracing Dev/Ops and Cloud deployments, albeit the latter was aimed at investment banking applications classes.

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