Re: New iSeries Purchases ? "Family loyalty"; IBM's big mistake (IMHO)

Nathan M. Andelin wrote:

>My gut-feel is that most iSeries sales go to existing customers.  Rochester
>seems to be positioning the iSeries more for large data centers.  Not for
>small companies or new startups.  That's what I meant by "seedlings".
>
Well, I'd think that an upgrade can be every bit as important as a new
install. Of course, I'd like to see a lot more new installs.

But when a company upgrades to a new machine that has 2, 4, 8 or more
times the performance of the old one, my question would be: Did the
company's business volume grow by the same amount? Is the latest version
of the operating system so inefficient that the new computing power is
needed? Or is this upgrade because of a larger demand for computing
services? If it is the latter, then sale of the upgraded iSeries machine
represents implementing iSeries technology to solve problems that might
have gone to other platforms. Even if that meant adding NT servers to
make SQL requests of "legacy" iSeries data.

In Fortune 100 companies, how many "new installs" could there be? (okay,
100 if none of them have an iSeries.) Since they all have an IBM
midrange around someplace, won't they all just be "upgrades" or "new
models"? But that doesn't represent a lack of iSeries penetration.
Rather it demonstrates that the iSeries continues to accumulate workload
even though the demands of the businesses with them installed have
changed greatly.

Sun made a fortune in new installs during the dot com boom. In the dot
com bust, the flood of barely used Sun equipment on the market increased
the impact of the drop off in demand. Not all new installs are destined
to be long term revenue.

>Nathan M. Andelin
>www.relational-data.com
>

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Chris Rehm
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