I must admit it, IBM is nailing it in Spain.

Today there was an article about IBM in elpais.es, a mainstream media. Mainstream media is not very objective nowadays but this article they wrote about the IBM is true: they successfully transitioned from machines to services and consultancy and shows no sign of weakening.

IBM did many things the right way here in Spain in the last decade, one was understanding the average Spanish developer and the average project manager. Over all Spanish workers want someone to point at when there are problems and IBM was there to get the blame and get problems solved (even when the fault was not theirs).

You may come to tell me (as many developers do every week) that free source projects are better than commercial licensed products, and I will tell you what I always say: be careful of “free software”, because free software is getting more “joputa” (weasel) everyday.

Example: Liferay may be free, but if you want official support for those nasty issues it has got you better take out the paycheck. And in Spain if you are a middle rank boss and haven’t got the “officially-supported” tag for your I.T.  you are “con el culo al aire” (fucked).

Another example: Bindows or dhtmlx may sound nice, but if you want real world functionality (further from “Hello World”), you will need the commercial licenses.

Another one: Hibernate rules, as long as you know what you must know in order to handle data appropriately.

And so on… there are not many real open source, free and worth-it software products nowadays, and even tough there are nice tools that will earn you money in licenses the average Spaniard is just to scared to risk their businesses on them because they know expertise is lacking in their own companies.

The Hibernate example is a good one: do you know how many projects went awry because very big companies like Indra, Telefonica, Vodafone or many others didn’t have in-house available experts on those technologies? and don’t ask those companies to rely on freelance experts, not in Spain, where relying on those supposed “mercenarios” is considered humiliating.

Companies like IBM or Oracle have a very good position in Spain and they will surely keep it for years as Microsoft and SAP don’t seem to be able to find their own butts with their own hands when it comes to BMP, SOA and Multi-Plattform support, not for talking about governance, change traceability or Time-To-Market.