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Our sales/marketing guy emailed me last night with a copy of what he is sending to the board members. They currently aren't a customer of ours. We have pitched our solution to them several times which is:

1. Continue with the existing software on a new i5 (lower total TCO).
2. Switch to us for maintenance and support on the application.
3. Become a member of our open source community which gives them some immediate enhancements to the product, most of them new GUI (HTML) interfaces to existing data.

Our challenge is that we don't have a complete replacement for their existing software, yet. The beauty of our approach is that we can continue to support them with their existing 5250 based applications while releasing new functionality. We use the same database so whether our program updates the data or the original 5250 application updates the data, it still resides in the same database.

Unfortunately we don't hear of these folks until the damage is already done (again, they aren't customers of ours, we prospect for them but sometime finding them is difficult). Getting them to upgrade to an i5 is sometimes like pushing water uphill. They already see the i5 as just an "newer" AS/400. They don't see it as the wonderfully flexible, powerful box that it is.

We are on this. It's too bad that we don't engage these folks before they already have made some faulty assumptions.

Pete


Vernon Hamberg wrote:

Just read the second article - Hahn, who is quoted in the first, says, "Something doesn't cost $300,000 unless it has some value on it,"

Now on the surface that seems a poor reason to go with a solution - it costs a lot, therefore it must be good. (Let's hear it for Anderson Consulting.) Of course, I did take the quote out of its context, which had to do with, should they buy a solution or build their own. But it still seems an odd way to justify something.

I think IBM or a partner has dropped a ball here - this agency is paying around $65K bucks a year and no one has talked about modernization to them? And this is only a 10-year old system. Web stuff was available then, and was in pretty usable shape 5-7 years ago, esp. with net.data, etc.

Pete, I hope you can talk to them - the second article suggests they were willing to review things - hope it is not too late.

Vern



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