RE: Dropping the AS/400 as a Web serving platform

That was my calculation using the management services that our E-mail
marketing company does.  The calculation came when the 250,000 E-mail sent
aprox 25% of them coming to the site - but remember - the name of the site
they are going to is www.myfreeitems.com our "Low End" site.

As far as everyone else tossing suggestions my way - THANKS!  But I've tried
a great deal of the things mentioned before we were switched, and frankly my
upper management have spoken - and in some cases, probably placed down
payments already.  There were suggestions to replace the 400 from outside
sources as well - so we were doomed with some outside opinions that even
backed them up.

Frankly the thing that amazed me, is everyone on this list focused on the
problems I was having with the 400, and not the current perception of the
box, which in my humble opinion - is our biggest problem.  All of us could
probably solve the technical problems, but eventually the fact that there
aren't enough qualified available WEB individuals on AS/400's to really make
a difference in that opinion.  Many of the SERIOUS E-commerce players, that
also have AS/400's as their back end, front end them with something
different.  Many of the IBM "Powered by AS/400" accounts have slowly
switched to unix or the dang server-farm by now.  Songfile was supposedly an
OS/400 website is really an NT site, with OS/400 as the database.  I don't
agree with our switch, but I've already shared the reasons behind them, and
in some instances, I can even see the err of my ways when we initially
designed the whole system.  But facts are facts - when the CEO is walking
around the datacenter of some bodacious web companies, and none of their
equipment is AS/400, and then you walk through our ISP where I'm currently
co-hosted, and they can't help us because they have never seen an AS/400
before, or probably ever again.  Then the partners that serve millions of
people a day (www.grouplotto.com) are on Sun Solaris it doesn't take long to
realize that we're really the only kids on the block with one of "These."

Heck - more of "us" are retiring every day, then entering our realm of
programming using the iSeries.

>If you are getting a 25% response rate to "e-mail marketing" then that is
>truly astonishing, let alone getting that response within an hour. Having
>had a quick look at the site it seems to have a crude e-mail harvester
>built into it - please give us the e-mail address of a friend. That, along
>with the statement that the e-mails are going out by the million, tends to
>suggest that the recipients are not very highly targeted.

>Looking at published response rates for e-mail marketing a much lower
>response rate might be expected. For example, an article at the following
>link http://www.salon.com/tech/view/2000/04/17/brondmo/index1.html suggests
>6-10% for untargeted mail rising to 17% for targeted and 32% for
>individualised. Intuitively I find even rates as high as this difficult to
>believe.

>Dave...