That ROI Thing

As many of you know, we're not big fans of using Return On Investment as most important value proposition for infrastructure investments.  We've written a lot on the subject in this newsletter and in our book.  Certainly, ROI has its place.  But it's important to build a strong case around other value props.  We're bringing this up because of two unrelated things that happened last week.  Early in the week we had a tech company come by to tell us how great their stuff was and how it could be used by energy companies to achieve a great ROI.  And later in the week, Exxon announced its $10.36 billion profit, the second largest for a US corporation.  While that tech company is doing some very interesting work, it might occur to them that saving Exxon a few million dollars of datacenter spending may not be Job #1 for a company that's embarrassed by its huge windfall.  Maybe trying a new tack like helping Exxon find more oil reserves faster or getting greater yields out of existing fields would be a better way to get senior management's attention.  Exxon would probably be tickled to have a few hundred million dollars of datacenter expenses to write off if it could substantially improve their oil reserve portfolio later on.