RE: Help required to stop this company replacing their iSeries

If the company hasn't come up with a business case for replacing the
platform in the first place it's gonna be a steep uphill battle or a
tall, wide stone wall.

-Jim 

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Raby, Steve
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 3:48 AM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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