Re: Price Increases !!!!! Abandonment rate

[Randy Mangham <randym69@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

There have been a few local companies who have adopted the AS/400 solely for
running their Domino applications on small machines. I consider that somewhat of
a victory, of course, but at least in San Diego, the loss rate is greater than
the gain rate from both my personal experience and what I hear from my
colleagues. Several very large local AS/400 installations have defected to Unix
to run SAP. Certainly, the small shops always come and go but when the big boys
leave, that means no big upgrade revenue to IBM EVER (unless they bought
RS/6000's, of course, and the profit margin on that hardware must be close to
nil). No local Unix shops to my knowledge have abandoned their platform. A 
number
of smaller AS/400 installations running CISC machines are seriously considering
NT instead of a RISC upgrade. They see the upfront cost only, of course, of
AS/400 vs. an Intel platform w/NT but to a small company management the short
term numbers are very compelling to ditch the AS/400 entirely if they find a
suitable application package on NT. A few large AS/400 shops HAVE upgraded to 
big
8- or12-ways because of the significant investment in custom code they have 
which
makes them unlikely to adopt a non AS/400 software package but they are quite
rare locally. It's not the number of my own clients I've seen leave the AS/400,
it's the number of times I hear the same story from other consultants that
concerns me. These are companies that will never grow into a larger (more
profitable for IBM) machine.

Randy Mangham
Pacific Crest Consulting
San Diego, CA

boothm@earth.goddard.edu wrote:

> OK, you lost two or three.  That happens.  But more importantly, did you
> gain any?  Did new firms join the family?
> _______________________
> Booth Martin
> boothm@earth.goddard.edu
> http://www.spy.net/~booth
> _______________________
>
> Randy Mangham <randym69@pacbell.net>
> Sent by: owner-midrange-l@midrange.com
> 12/07/1999 11:07 PM
> Please respond to MIDRANGE-L
>
>
>         To:     MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
>         cc:
>         Subject:        Re: Price Increases !!!!! Abandonment rate
>
>  I lost two customers this past year to Unix
> and NT (one to each) and am aware of several other local companies that
> moved to
> either Unix or NT. (Not to mention the third client that went belly up
> with14
> installed machines.)
>
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