RE: Staying current on releases? (was: Are there any System i siteson the Internet that offer accounts?)

We've polled our customers and found that the vast majority run V5R3 and
V5R4. However, there are a significant number of customers who run
older releases, which is why we have numerous test environments that
stretch back to V4R5. Add in the multiple language and CCSID
environments, and our test lab ends up with about 10 systems or lpars
devoted just to testing environments. It's quite an investment.

We'd love everybody to run at only the IBM supported releases, but
reality is reality.

jte

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-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mark S.
Waterbury
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 8:14 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Staying current on releases? (was: Are there any
System i siteson the Internet that offer accounts?)

Hi, Lucas:

Many software vendors or ISVs intentionally maintain a
development system several releases behind the latest, in
order to continue to support customers who may be on even
older releases. So, for example, from a V5R2 development
system, you can compile and save objects for TGTRLS(V4R5M0).

ISVs typically do not want to walk away from sales or
maintenance revenue because they no longer support an older
release. Of course, there are diminishing returns supporting
really older releases. Some vendors adopt a strategy of
maintaining a "frozen" version of their products for those
customers on really old releases.

Mark

> Lukas Beeler wrote:

Are there many people that run something below V5R3? V5R3

is currently the lowest release supported.

Do you really think that the people running unsupported

i5/OS versions are the majority of System i users?

I know a few customers that are not current on their OS,

but that has usually political reasons. And they're very few.

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