Re: Help required to stop this company replacing their iSeries

It's too bad IBM can't help provide a cost of ownership analysis and/or bullets 
of why it's best to keep one of the best business computers in history.  
 
  
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Raby, Steve <agnictsr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Fri, 30 Jun 2006 10:47:41 +0200
Subject: Help required to stop this company replacing their iSeries


Hello Chaps and Chapesses,

I was on this list last year, and left the company I was with to go contracting 
for GEAC, not knowing of the imminent take over. But I digress, that is not the 
problem, I have recently taken a contract here in the Netherlands at a place 
that has a fairly new iSeries(year or so old I think) on 5.2. The system they 
have was written in house over the last 10-12 years in RPGIII and I am in the 
process of helping them bring it up to date and I am trying to help that along 
further using what little I know of RPGIV/ILE. The guy here is really 
enthusiastic to learn all he can from me (in exchange he is teaching me ASP and 
HTML), the problem is now they had a meeting here yesterday and horror of 
horrors they are talking of replacing the iSeries with some other system, 
oracle 
or some such rubbish, over the next couple of years.

So the help we require is how do we convince them not to replace the iSeries? 
We 
need to build up a business case (I think money is the biggest consideration 
for 
them) and any help anyone can give us would be most appreciated. It is not that 
I am scared for my contract, there is enough work to keep me going for a few 
years even if they do decide to change, I just dont want to see another iSeries 
shop bite the dust.

I hope this is the right list to mention this on and my apologies if not.

Thanks in advance

Steve Raby