RE: Help me build some useful things for the iSeries

Brad,

Nice to see strong ISVs talking about new apps.

But I don't know about 3K...?  Hard to tell...  There's some PC competition,
too.  I looked at Monarch, shoot, 5 or 10 years ago, and it did some of this
for a few C-notes.  I'm sure it's advanced since then.  There are several
others in this space on both the PC and 400 end, but I haven't looked at 'em
lately.  I looked at RJS Software about 3 years ago, and they had REAL
strong offerings then...

IMHO, purchasers frequently compare a per seat cost with a per enterprise
cost.  They start out thinking:  We just need this for a few power-users, so
the per enterprise cost don't look too hot..  Then by the time the find out
a whole bunch of people can use the software, they've already sunk time into
getting it working.  So they either shell out an equivalent number of $ they
would have spent on the 400-centric software, or they just bootleg it.

If it CAN be done on a PC, it's a tough market...  Doesn't really matter if
it's efficient to do it that way or not.  Entry level price often
dictates...  So if you can market a product as something EVERY user MUST
HAVE, you'll probably have better luck selling in the $K price range on a
per processor or tier arrangement.

The feature of capturing job info sounds rare, and may be worth some $.  But
IIRC I did a crude version of that 8 or 10 years ago, so somebody's bound to
release it as OSS or shareware, and take away that selling point.  (Never
tried to duplicate the job#, BTW.)

If you research what's out there, there may be different products that do
pieces of what your talking about, but nothing that covers the entire range.
I don't know...  (Again, check out what RJS is up to lately.)  Now, if
that's the case, and customers actually need that broad of an offering..
you'd have a much better opportunity...  Your product would start looking
good, as soon as the purchaser has to look at 2 or 3 products to do what
they need...

However, IMNAI (ISV).

jt



> -----Original Message-----
> From: midrange-l-admin@midrange.com
> [mailto:midrange-l-admin@midrange.com]On Behalf Of Brad Jensen
> Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2001 9:47 PM
> To: midrange-l@midrange.com
> Subject: Help me build some useful things for the iSeries
>
>
> I'm a vendor of archive systems for the AS/400. Ours is PC based,
> but from the very start
> we out green screen access into our product (we did it at first
> with screen scraping you would not believe!)
> That was 12 years ago.
>
> Now we do everything TCP/IP. As a part of our system, we created
> programmable FTP and LPD servers on the PC.
>
> We've started to branch out with new products designed around
> these capabilities - like a report bursting and distribution
> system. Next, a PDFMailer to email reports.
>
> Now I am thinking of other things to do with this - like may
> WEBOUTQ, to print OUTQ entries to a web server, saving all the
> JOB, FILE, USER, USERDATA, DATE, PAGES, and TIME info, while
> converting the files to PDF so they can be viewed over the web
> without downloading the whole thing at once. Do you guys think
> this would be a useful thing, priced at about 3k? The idea is that
> you save your reports to it, and then you can go back and search
> by date, job, etc. With disk space so cheap on a PC, you could
> probably keep years with of reports for most iSeries systems.
>
> I'm also wondering about print to XLS, print to MDB, print to
> HTML, print to XML, etc. (we have a data extractor program that we
> can run in batch.)  We like to do things so that they are hands
> free on the PC - using CL to control the process for the AS/400
> side.
>
> What about an XML interface to green screen aps?
>
> I really wish I could....
>
> ?
>
>
>
>
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