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50,000 function points for what?

MM: I’d like to address one issue, there, Mike. As a CTO of a SaaS company, I’m sure you’ll have some things to say about this.

When I look at an enterprise application—whether it’s a supply-chain management system or ERP system—generally most of these enterprise applications have anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 function points in them. Would you concur?

MB: Yes. Very large and complex systems.

MM: Very robust. Okay. Then when we look at the deployment of those systems, the core user of those systems barely uses 200 of the function points.

MB: Correct.

MM: Then if you look at what 95% of the value is that most users generate from that system, it boils down to maybe 20 to 50 function points.

MB: I would agree.

MM: If you’ve got 50,000 function points and 50 are delivering 95% of the value, what do you call the other 49,950 function points?

MB: Well, some of them are legacy — right? They’re there because of the way you got to what you’re selling today.

MM: What do you call it in economic terms?

MB: Low leverage. That’s what I’d call it.

MM: I would call it, “massive overhead.” Massive costs.

MB: Yes. But I wouldn’t even blame it on the function points, interestingly enough. To me, if you have a functional aspect of your system and it’s debugged and documented and so forth, then the cost of continuing to deliver that function in a new version of your product is not that high.

MM: But you know that when you come up with a new module or a new extension of it, oftentimes that’s the source of the bug. A previously well-behaved documented debugged piece of code all of a sudden becomes the errant citizen in the new release.

MB: Well, I would say that that’s true because of the…

MM: Bad architecture?

No. Not necessarily even because of bad architecture. One of the reasons I work in a SaaS company is because I could no longer see a need for multi-platform packaged software any more.

MM: Exactly.

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