RE: Business Partner bashing

Tony, I'm a North American BP with an ERP application.  We are application-
and product-oriented (because our product is far superior to our marketing).
I take exception to your rose-colored glasses view of BP-dom.

We put together a package of hardware and our software ($100k+) and present
competitive packages to our customers located throughout the U.S. and
Canada.  But it's not unusual for a local BP sales-type to come in and sell
the system we configured with a toilet-paper inventory system ($2K) as their
value-add.  The customer wants to save bucks...who'd blame him?  Meanwhile,
we've done the work for the hardware and get no hardware credit.  The BP's
talk about providing free training and support, but once the machine's
installed, they make Gary Condit and Chandra Levy look like publicity
freaks.

Yes, there are iSeries business partners out there who know nothing; they're
calling all the time and trying to chisel a piece of our business because
they're "local".  There are business partners and local IBM managers who
collude to exclude out-of-area vendors.  Like it or not, IBM does not police
BP's: all IBM wants is to sell big boxes with lots of IBM software
preloaded.

I use BP's for components of our application and for handling network and
configuration issues; I'm happy to give them the business.  But there are
plenty of weasels out there, and I think Don's literal emphasis on
"well-policed" is appropriate.

If your outfit behaves according to IBM's guidelines, I look forward to
working with you in the future.

Reeve Fritchman
Chairman, Transportation Technology Group, Inc.
4915 S. Westshore Boulevard
Tampa, Florida  33611
reeve@transtechgroup.com (e-mail)
813-831-8574 (voice)



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-midrange-l@midrange.com [mailto:owner-midrange-l@midrange.com]On
Behalf Of tawbrey@ascend-tech.com
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2001 9:03 AM
To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
Subject: Business Partner bashing


Don,

I am curious why you feel it necessary to bash all IBM business partners in
this  forum all the time. Do you truly feel that most BP's are not
knowledgeable and loyal to their customer base? I am sure there are some
that are not, but the vast majority are and will continue to be committed
to their customers.

Thanks,

Tony Awbrey
Technical Specialist

IBM Certified Specialist --
     iSeries Technical Solutions Design V4R5
     iSeries Solution Sales V4R5
     Domino for AS/400

Ascend Technologies, Inc.
2658 Crosspark Rd. Suite 200
Coralville, IA 52241
Voice: 319.626.5490 ext. 825
Fax:     319.626.5491



                    Don
                    <dr2@cssas400.com>        To:
MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
                    Sent by:                  cc:
                    owner-midrange-l@mi       Subject:     Re: IBM getting
rid of RPG
                    drange.com


                    07/28/2001 05:03 PM
                    Please respond to
                    MIDRANGE-L








Rewrite?  NAH, they'd wing some conversion tool at us and give us a few
months to convert before pulling out the rug...:)

And, then, there's ALWAYS those incredibly knowledgeable, loyal to the
user, WELL POLICED BY IBM and impecibley credible "business
partners"........



On Sat, 28 Jul 2001, John Rockwell wrote:

> One of the problems where this penalty comes into play involves a large
number of
> programs built to provide us with an Executive Information System.  It
would take
> a significant amount of time to rewrite those programs just to get back
to where
> we were when we started from a presentation point of view, time that
management
> may not feel too pleased about providing us with.  This system is written
> entirely in RPG and displays various business trends in offsetting
colored bar
> graphs.  Its used to encourage peer-to-peer management (competition)
among
> multiple plants instead of making the plant managers respond to seemingly
> arbitary directives handed down from above (it gets rid of the  'you
don't live
> in the real world' arguments because they're competing against people who
live in
> the same world that they do).  There's also a drill-down function built
into the
> bars on all of the graphs so people can see where the numbers came from.
> Re-writing code for file maintenance programs will be considerably
easier.
>
>
> Joe Pluta wrote:
>
> > There are ways around the interactive tax.  In fact, I'll be doing a
seminar
> > on exactly that topic at COMMON.  The basic idea is to modify your
programs
> > to run in batch and talk to a data queue instead of a display file.
Once
> > you do that, you can pretty quickly attach a user interface, either
thick
> > client or thin.  A thick client can be written in VB or Java, or you
can use
> > a servlet engine such as WebSphere or Tomcat to run your applications
via a
> > browser.  It's fast, powerful, flexible and relatively painless.
> >
> > This way, your primary business logic is still written in RPG, which I
> > contend is the best language for defining business rules in the
business,
> > primarily because of its tight integration with the database.  And,
once
> > you've started separating your business logic from your presentation,
you
> > can start looking at moving towards a true client/server architecture,
which
> > is where I believe the iSeries will truly outpace any other platform.
> >
> > Joe
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: owner-midrange-l@midrange.com
> > > [mailto:owner-midrange-l@midrange.com]On Behalf Of William A Pack
> > > Sent: Saturday, July 28, 2001 11:09 AM
> > > To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
> > > Subject: IBM getting rid of RPG
> > >
> > >
> > >       I liked Mr. Rockwell's comments.  IBM is trying everything
> > > to get people to
> > > abandon current applications and migrate to something they want to
sell,
> > > like Java or Domino.  They are good alternatives for new apps,
> > > but if I have
> > > a business running for 5-10 years on good software, why should I
> > > change just
> > > because IBM wants me to?  IBM is going to piss off quite a few
customers,
> > > who will remember the favor that IBM did them by jacking up the cost
of
> > > interactive workload.  If they have to change applications, my
> > > guess is they
> > > will be implemented on a cluster of Wintel boxes, just to return the
favor
> > > to IBM.  I really want to now the technical reasons IBM has for
costing on
> > > interactive features.  They claim it is harder to do 5250 now that 3
years
> > > ago.  Why?
> > >       The System 3/x family was sold as a programmerless systems.
> > >  The AS/400 was
> > > sold as a system that will maintain investment in applications
> > > and business
> > > practices.  Now, the only thing that sets the 400 apart from the sea
of
> > > Intel based clones is the single manufacturer.   Looks like the
future
> > > belongs to Wintel and C#.
> >
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