Re: ADVERTISING SUPPORT/ComputerWorld 7/28 - LONG

James wrote:
>Could you give us a couple of quotable quotes? I stopped my subscription
>to ComputerWorld 20 years ago after reading 5 years of articles about
>the "death" of RPG. ;-)  (vs the "life" of COBOL...BTW even it still
>lives and breathes)

IBM brings AS/400 basics to students
                                                  Tim Ouellette
                                                    07/28/97

                Some of the most in-demand information technology staff in
the industry work on a system that some people -
                particularly college students - don't even know exists.

                For the estimated 50,000 IBM AS/400 shops in the U.S., that
 has meant a la ck of qualified AS/400 staff.

                In fact, in some parts of the country, AS/400 programmers
command higher salaries than their Unix counterparts
                (see chart).

                To address the skills shortage, IBM is bringing AS/400
systems and training directly to college campuses around
                the country. The paradox IBM faces is that the AS/400 is an
 easy-to-use, general-purpose business machine.
                That's good, but it also means there are few students in
college toying with the system the way they do with
                Unix and C++, for example. As a result, when AS/400 shops
need to tune their systems to improve performance
                for a certain use, there are fewer bodies out there to get
the job done.

                Instead, users have to depend on an existing talent pool or
 fork out money to train someone on a completely
                new system.

                ``IBM has a huge problem facing it, because the AS/400 has
no presence on the campus,'' said Nate Viall,
                president of Nate Viall & Associates, Inc., a consultancy
in Des Moines,Iowa.

                To change that, IBM will donate an AS/400 and software to
colleges sponsored by a reseller or customer. By
                year's end, IBM will alter and package its current AS/400
training courses aimed at businesspeople to target
                college students.

                For example, to get more AS/400 skills, Enterprise
Rent-A-Car in St. Louis sponsored Jefferson College in
                Hillsboro, Mo., along with numerous St. Louis-area high
schools. IBM officials said there are 26 schools in such
                partnerships, the first of which was Georgia Southern
University in Statesboro. There are also about 120
                schools already with some sort of AS/400 curriculum, but
users and IBM want to quickly double that.

                That's because IBM's plans come at a crucial time, as
AS/400 shops debate whether to off-load some of the
                box's duties to Windows NT or Unix servers.

                ``They should have been attacking the education market for
the last 10 years or more to proactively create
                AS/400 skills,'' said Eli Sinyak, director of branch
operations at American General Finance in Evansville, Ind.
                American General runs 1,400 AS/400s managed by five systems
 managers.

                Although demand has always been strong for AS/400 staff,
``it is just more pronounced lately because users are
                renewing their commitment to the technology,'' Sinyak said.


                And with users planning to upgrade to the multi-CPU RISC
AS/400s due later this year, there could be even
                more demand for high-end application tuning.

                But at the same time, IBM's push to make the AS/400 a Java
machine gives Java developers a way to program
                on the AS/400.

                For example, Gartner Group, Inc. analyst Bruce Bond
recommends that AS/400 shops stop programming in
                RPG, the box's traditional midrange programming language,
in favor of newer methods such as Java.





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