RE: Left AS/400 and Returned -- MIDRANGE-L

It seems to me that IBM could get a lot of mileage out of sites/stories such as 
the one below. IBM should work out a 'Showcase' deal with them. In exchange for 
some kind of discount or whatever, the customer/site would agree to act as a 
reference.

I did a temporary facilities management deal for a company quite a few years 
ago. They'd been bought and the parent company was hard at work on an 18-month 
project to convert their S/38 apps over to the parent's Digital system of some 
sort. When I got there, the project was somewhere around the 2-year mark and 
estimate to completion was still 18 months.

The _big_ hangup at the time was all the subfiles -- there was nothing like 
them on the parent company side, possibly still isn't. They seem old to us, but 
they're sure handy in an interactive app. We can take such things almost for 
granted.

Tom Liotta

midrange-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

>   7. Re: Left AS/400 and Returned (R Bruce Hoffman)
>
>date: 29 Apr 2005 10:30:32 -0400
>from: R Bruce Hoffman
>
>I worked for a company that, in 1994, decided that the three AS400's
>(one 300GB+ production machine, one 50GB development machine, one
>sandbox machine, a 20S IIRC, and 8+ million lines of custom code in RPG,
>COBOL and PL/I) decided that it was time to replace everything in a
>"Business Re-Engineering" project.
>
>To what? AIX and Informix. 
>
>I recommended upgrading the boxes to RISC, installing and using DataProp
>and deploying the data warehouse from another 400. They said no. There
>were committed to coming off the 400 platform.
>
>That was it for me. I went back to consulting.
>
>For three years they tried just to get a basic data warehouse running
>that was accurate and could be updated from the 80,000+ active contracts
>maintained on the 400s in less than 3 days.
>
>Never happened.
>
>3 years, 15+ MILLION dollars later... what did they do? They fired the
>contract firm that had convinced them to do this in the first place.
>They upgraded all their 400s. They installed Data Propagator. They built
>the warehouse on a 400.
>
>Still up today.
>
>By the way, out of 24 or so, highly skilled, multi-language, VERY loyal,
>in-house trained programmers, all but one or two have left. So the
>company lost a LOT more than $15 million.

-- 
Tom Liotta
The PowerTech Group, Inc.
19426 68th Avenue South
Kent, WA 98032
Phone  253-872-7788 x313
Fax    253-872-7904
http://www.powertech.com



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