RE: Left AS/400 and Returned

[Evan Harris <spanner@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Tom

I've seen a few of these  myself. IBM's big problem (at least in IMHO) is 
that since they no longer clearly differentiate along platform lines they 
are always trapped by the desire to be not to negative about the proposed 
solution so as not to preclude them selves from the consulting solution. My 
feeling is that's why they are never as chest-beating about these things as 
the other vendors - it might lose them some services revenue.

There have been at least three occasions where I feel they could have 
convinced a customer to go iSeries but were so concerned with staying in 
the race for pSeries/db2 against solaris/oracle that they botched the 
entire sale. Again IMHO only.

My experience is that a facilities management role is a great way to see 
how poor the other operating systems and databases really are in terms of 
requiring on-going intervention. I saw a lot of Oracle/Sun work and 
db2/pSeries ( I won't even bother with the SQL Server stuff) and couldn't 
believe (and still can't) what they took for granted as required to manage 
the database. I still give some of them cr*p about having to manage extents 
manually.

Regards
Evan Harris

At 09:30 p.m. 30/04/2005, you wrote:
> 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