They might care
The question is, can they afford it? Certs are very expensive, and ongoing maintenance of certification is becoming more and more financially onerous for consulting firms, as desperate software firms are looking at cert programs as a way to make revenue from their client base (resellers/consultants/VARs), instead of as a driver to help build business for the actual product. Couple that with the massive consolidation in the IT consulting industry, and you end up in a situation where consultancies are not interested in small clients because they can't get the economies of scale to justify the cost, and small clients can't afford the premium they have to pay to the consulting firms just for being small. Not enough certified consultants to go around, and they prefer to concentrate on the big boys because the big boys are the ones that can pay for the big jobs.
Look at it this way. Let's say you're a small company that sells educational equipment; overheads, chalkboards, chalk, notebooks, that sort of thing. You've got two partners, a part time secretary, and various outside sales folks that throw business your way for a piece of the action. Your business is growing, and you're getting to the point where tracking all the pieces you sell is getting hard; you're now carrying enough stuff that you just can't keep it on index cards anymore. So, you want to digitize. You want to be able to stick it all in a db, have a little front end that's going to track your customers, your orders, your invoices, and the parts so you can keep a grip on your inventory (inventory getting out of hand is one of the major things that kills small but growing businesses like this). you want to be able to put it on the web so your outside contacts can go get information from you without bugging you personally anymore, and can input an order so you can start prepping for delivery right away.
You don't want to deal with spreadsheets because you know that you've never managed to keep a spreadsheet going with that kind of data in it for long enough to actually use it; once it gets past a certain point, the sheet is just unmanageable, and eventually it's going to blow up anyway and then all your data is gone.
Where are you going to go? A system like that from a company like EDS is going to cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars at least, and will also involve ongoing licensing costs on an annual basis. There's no way you can deal with that. So, you look around at the midrange. You can get a zOS machine for fifteen or twenty K, but again you have the ongoing costs, and it also makes you completely dependent on your vendor and you still have to pay somebody 200$/Hr (from the vendor, natch) to actually build the system for you, and that's probably going to take what, a few hundred hours at least? So, what are you going to do? Your business' margin after you and your partner pay for your living expenses is not that large, but at least your not on the Bataan death march anymore, but the simple fact is that ponying up the dough for something like that is simply not going to happen because your house is already hocked to the max to get the money to get the business going in the first place, and the simple fact of the matter is that the bank is not going to take the risk on you, because they're completely risk averse these days after watching a whole bunch of their money go up in smoke over the last two years.
It's a catch-22 that many businesses find themselves in. They've gotten big enough to start needing stuff, but they're not big enough to be able to compete with the corner the big firms have managed to lay on the IT labour market. They need to look outside the box, but they don't even know they're in a box.
If you do MySQL, you can reach those people, but that means you're going to have to be a salesman first and a programmer second. If you don't want to be a salesman, do DB2 and get into servicing the corpse^R^R market instead.
--\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton jake at consultron.ca *\n* [link|http://consultron.ca|http://consultron.ca] [link|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] *\n* Kingston Ontario Canada [link|news://news.consultron.ca|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------
