RE: Upgrade Considerations: Software vs Hardware

Forwarded by moderator on behalf of Eric Wolf:
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Al,
I have to agree (as you can see by the responses of the other members) that
it will be less expensive in the long run to upgrade and convert to RISC and
XA.  The differences in the response time should be quite noticeable.
Besides the obvious issues mentioned by other users (1-not much of a
learning curve for users and programmers), think of the annual license fees
that you (may) have been paying and have never taken advantage of (i.e.:
annual upgrades to software, etc.).
Unless, of course, your DB version is so heavily modified that the review
and implementation costs outweigh the upgrade costs.  But how much will it
cost to learn the new software and modify it?  How many programmers and
consultants are out there that no the new software? And on, and on....

Eric Wolf

-----Original Message-----
From:   owner-mapics-l@midrange.com [mailto:owner-mapics-l@midrange.com] On
Behalf Of aldg
Sent:   Wednesday, August 30, 2000 9:38 AM
To:     MAPICS Mailing List
Cc:     Gershen, Al; Gershen, Al
Subject:        Upgrade Considerations: Software vs Hardware

Hi Mapics ML:

My employer has an interesting situation to ponder and I thought I would
request some feedback from the ML members because you may have been though a
similar situation before.

We've been a Mapics DB (Y2K, Mod 4) user for many years on a CISC version of
the AS/400.  If we upgrade to Mapics XA, we have to replace our hardware
with RISC type because EA doesn't support CISC.

We have been looking at other ERP software such as HarrisData because it
will run on our existing hardware and it appears to be similar to Mapics.

The other consideration is that apparantly IBM won't be offering any
upgrades or support for our old CISC machine in the future.

My employer is trying to make the best decision given the economic
restraints it has to operate in.  If money were no object, we would probably
upgrade to XA and get the new hardware but this is the real world that we
are dealing in and the decision has to be analyzed from all points of view.

Please comment on this situation so that I can offer my employer some of
your suggestions on this matter.



--
Above message before copy enclosure (if any) was sent by:

Al Gershen
Grants Pass, OR 97526
aldg@mail.rvi.net & aldg@webtv.net;
and thru ICQ # 12342782
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