I heard the word “commodity” used several times at the ASMP meeting last week. The implied message seemed to be that the University should always go with a commodity solution when one is available. Hopefully it won’t really be “always”. Big enterprises don’t buy enterprise-class hardware and software just because they can afford to and are too dumb to figure out that a commodity solution is available; there usually is some additional value that the enterprise solution provides. Since the University is an enterprise-scale organization, we will need enterprise class solutions to some of our problems.