If a Usage Profile is so important to system scaling, why doesn't Open Text provide one for the solutions it sells?

That question, or one like it, has reverberated in my head for more than 1/2 dozen years when the term Usage Profile was first coined. Why indeed? Not only is the term and concept very useful in explaining how a Livelink-based solution functions (or not as the case may be) but the ability to discuss a particular Solution-based Usage Profile could so easily short-circuit many discussions saving customers and Open Text alike time and money. So why isn't there any to be found other than the Document-centric Usage Profile?

Well the answer is actually fairly simple, there has not been the commercial incentive for them to do so and what public corporation spends money when there is no incentive to do so? Damn few, that's for sure. Let's examine who wins and who loses with a comprehensive list of Usage Profiles mapping to specific Open Text Solutions:

Winners 

1. Customers -- Not only would having a baseline Usage Profile offer customers something to compare against to see how closely their current solution maps to the standard or average deployment of the same solution by others, but they would also have better tools to answer questions like "what happens when we add 'X' functionality to our Livelink system?"
2. Open Text Sales -- having the tools to semi-accurately answer the sizing, scaling, and infrastructural questions during the pre-sales process without spending hours (or days even) coming up with one-off estimates
3. Livelink Technical Consultants -- Nothing instills confidence in a technical consultant better than seeing the expected results from a set of recommendations that had been acted on and few things hurt that confidence more than seeing that the recommendations did not create the expected result. Without a pre-defined Usage Profile to guide them, Livelink Technical Consultants (within any Open Text department, partner, or 3rd-party) have only their experience to help them understand how a Usage Profile for a particular solution will differ from the published "Document-Centric Usage Profile" but with the knowledge of how other similar solutions work (at the infrastructural level) they can provide a more accurate description and allow customers/clients to better understand how their business interacts with Livelink and what affects certain business practices has upon the solution's infrastructure.
4. Open Text Customer Service -- having accurate solution-based Usage Profiles would aid the entire support workflow, from the first call on through all escalations. With defined Solution-based Usage Profiles the CSR answering the phone can immediately understand the typical types of problems common to these solutions and more quickly focus the investigative questions on likely problems seen elsewhere. 2nd and 3rd level CSRs would then have the tools to measure how far and in what way the solutions differed from "Normal" which would also help escalations management.
5. Open Text Global Services -- without the pre-existence of Solution-based Usage Profiles, OT GS (and other technical architecture providers) must either perform extensive modeling and analysis of a proposed solution or deliberately over-estimate a solution to assure there are enough resources to meet a particular load. Neither are desired outcomes; the former often leads to lost business as it is seen as too expensive and the latter only serves to add disdain and distrust to the relationship.

So, with so many obvious winners, why doesn't this information exist?

1. The required data MUST come exclusively from the set of customers that are happy with the service their Livelink deployment provides. Very few customers contact software vendors to supply good news, thus to get the necessary data requires proactive contact with existing deployments 
2. Customers have not demanded it ... perhaps a chicken-and-egg problem, how can customers demand something they don't really understand should exist? But without the customer demand to react to there must be an executive champion for the idea within Open Text that could muster up the budget and support for the undertaking
3. The required technology for doing this in a distributed fashion, like Liveink-Experts.com has done, is not an easy fit to Livelink itself nor to the current approach to creating an Usage Profile or otherwise scaling a Livelink deployment. It requires an easy, online, and mostly automated process that requires very little instruction or direct time yet the current approach to determining an Usage Profile uses client-side applications that require a significant amount of training to use effectively.
4. The required knowledge and skills to create something like the Online Livelink Performance Suite spans multiple disciplines with the majority of the required expertise living within the for-hire services organization (ie: Global Services), a revenue-generating, profit-oriented department that might actually see it's overall revenue decline inversely with the success of the program.

So, why can Livelink-Experts.com provide this service, what's in it for us? Well, frankly, we too are a commercial enterprise and so we are hoping for three things to occur:

1. To provide a service that a Livelink Administrator finds useful such that it will attract them to the site so we can introduce our members and their businesses to them (that's right, ads)
2. To provide a service that convinces a Livelink Administrator to purchase a premium account to access the extra benefits available to them (possibly saving thousands of dollars in the future)
3. To show off the Village technology so that other people can see the possibilities and choose to deploy their web community within GATE Village