What does it cost these days to develop decent enterprise software?

As I progressed thru my career (22 years in US and counting), I became more and more fascinated with just how much money is spent on so called enterprise software. My fascination has progressed thru several stages:

First, I became terrified by the actual licensing costs – “Oracle (or Sun, or, later, Redhat, or …) charges how much for support ???” This pain has eased a bit over the years as smart people have realized that a lot of open-source components cost less in the long run. But even then, the idea of someone dropping a cool mil on ERP implementation that does not work out of the box and forces his company change the business processes and lose even more money still fascinates me.

Second, the cost of keeping all these developers sunk in – “We have entire offices full of developers unable to develop their way out of a paper bag?” In government three-letter agencies and first tier contractors I had the privilege to work at, this was more of a rule than an exception.

As I matured as IT pro and started paying more attention to a bigger picture, the cost of delivering something in the IT has gained more nuances. See my post about outsourcing for example.

But probably the most fascinating angle of this is related to the productivity of individual developers. But more on that later.