[John Rogers]

The last several years before retirement I worked at an aircraft maintenance software company named Avexus and the software we developed did lots of stuff, track repairs, training, budgets, payroll, NDT, parts, invoices and God knows what else. It finally got so we would not sell it unless a company had a very well rounded IT staff with a senior Oracle DBA and an experienced apps server administrator. There was the database with test and production versions, apps server with 1800+ forms and 1200+ reports! The price with the underlying Oracle database, Oracle Apps, reports software, etc was in the neighborhood of $250,000 to get started.

We have customers both in the US and overseas that bought it and floundered for some time, could not get it to work right so then we would have to send in the "installer/trainer" and it took them a week at most to get things humming, train the admins, hold classes for the users, etc. Their initial cost of $300/hour (2006 prices) seemed high until...............