RE: Moaning about upgrade charges and email servers.

BPCS vendor does not have one contract for everyone that is the same.

Once upon a time we were current on SSA (before Infor) maintenance.
We wanted to move to another box. They wanted us to pay $ 50,000.00 for the
software license key to unlock BPCS to work on the new box. The company
fought them for 6 months to bring that price down, before we did get the
replacement box, and we had to get help from IBM.

I believe they operate on the basis of their vision of whether or not the
customer has deep pockets. They charge what they think they can get away
with. A company with deep pockets pays the cost of doing business, and
moves on with their lives. A company without deep pockets, or one for which
some principles are more important than moving on with the business, fights
them tooth and nail.

We have had multiple such fights.

Later they increased the annual fee for maintenance from $15,000 to $ 25,000
& at that point we looked into alternative sources for BPCS tech support &
moved to a MUCH cheaper solution, with support service considerably superior
to what we had been getting for all users except I no longer had access to
the OSG data base (I had been the only employee using it).

During a conversion of BPCS from lower version to 405CD, we started at
security level 40, but the conversion effort kept crashing, until we lowered
security to level 30. I now believe the problem was with the SSA conversion
software, but at the time we thought it was with BPCS.

There's a security upgrade needed for 405 CD that our company has not
invested the time & $ for. So long as the only users are internal
employees, the security risk is much lower than if you have a system where
people can get at your system from the Internet.

-
Al Mac

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of rob@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, April 24, 2009 7:14 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Moaning about upgrade charges and email servers.

We have a 170 with V5R1, because the company is not going to pay Infor

what
they want from us to move BPCS to a more modern system.

What exactly does Infor charge for moving from a 170 THAT IS CURRENT ON
THEIR INFOR MAINTENANCE BILL to, oh, let's say a Power 6 520 8203-E4A that
IBM is currently offering a rebate for if you order Infor (among others)
on it?

Company e-mail etc. is via a Microsoft server, because the company is

not
going to spend the money to fix BPCS 405CD security.

Just what the blazes does BPCS 405CD security have to do with email? I've
ran, and am running, 405CD on the same machine with Lotus Domino and I
can't even begin to fathom what you are talking about.

Rob Berendt