Re: Budgeting to replace V5R4

Rob,
sorry, I am a bit harsh using the term "end of life".

but the Avg span of the following dates GA -- Announce End of Mkt -- Effective end of Mkt -- End of Pgm suppt of previous 5 releases are
(v4r4, v4r5, v5r1, v5r2, v5r3):
GA to Announce end of Mkt: 771 days
Announce to Effective: 185.8 days (customer pushback?)
Effect to EndPgmSpt: 353.2 days
(avg span between releases - 420 days)

Same for V5R4:

GA to Announce end of Mkt: 1078 days
Announce to Effective: 850 days (customer pushback?)
Effect to EndPgmSpt: 857 days

span btwn V5R4, 6.1 - 766 days,
span btwn 6.1, 7.1 - 763 days


I only point this out, because I feel this is bad,
bad for all of us working with IBM i.
We have a few bad vendors, albeit major, and they are dragging all of us down...







On 9/17/2012 1:26 PM, rob@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

EOL on V5R4 was not 1/27/2009. That was announced end of Marketing.
Meaning you weren't supposed to be able to buy new copies of V5R4 for your
new system, nor get support upgrading to V5R4 from an earlier release
before then. I think they extended that out to 5/27/2011. End of support
isn't until end of September 2013. Then again, your definition of EOL and
mine might differ.
http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/i/planning/upgrade/suptschedule.html

I recently heard of people saying they were only upgrading to 6.1 because
they're vendor doesn't support 7.1, yet, after two plus years of general
availability. Love to know who those vendors are. You also had a good
question about are there vendors who do not support 6.1 yet. You can spot
those who are killing off their i accounts.

It took a long time for Trend Micro to support Scan Mail for Lotus Domino
on IBM i 7.1.

And nothing nauseates me more than a vendor who thumps their chest and
brags they support back to V3R2 but can't support the current release
until a couple of years after GA.


Rob Berendt