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Steve, There is MUCH more to the story (as usual).They run a 5250 based application called CIMS that, many moons ago, was the premier School Administration software in the country. IBM even licensed it for a while and there was quite a large install base (around 1200-1400 total). Great package. The original company, J&K Computers, was purchased by NCS (National Computer Systems). NCS was a hardware company that sold scanners and saw this as a way to grow their presence beyond scanning and scanforms. They didn't know much about software and knew next to nothing about the AS/400. They jettisoned most of the existing management and experienced developer staff over a few years. They closed the development shop and eventually offshored the maintenance while offering next to nothing as far as enhancements to customers. The customer base shrank. They made attempts to GUI the product using most screen scraper technology but never invested in approaches that would ensure a future. They bought other companies and tried to move existing customers to the software developed by these purchased companies. NCS was purchased, in turn, by Pearson PLC, a very large multinational company that sold textbooks (more "synergy") and had some other products in the education arena. Pearson has also purchased other solutions that used other platforms and then tried to move the now iSeries customers to those new applications and platforms.
I know this because I worked for J&K, then NCS. I left before Pearson came into the picture (thank goodness!).
This is less of a story about how the AS/400 is failing technology and more about bad product management. Heck, the AS/400 at HASB has been running for 10 years. How many Windows servers are they still running that are that old? The student application is a 5250 application (still) and still mostly RPGIII. It IS rather hard to use. But there is SO much more that could be said about other pluses and minuses.
The "rest of the story" is that the original authors of the software got together about 3 years ago and we started rewriting the application, from scratch, without source code, and it is all web based. It is even Open Source. It is still iSeries (System i) centric and we have about 100 or so of the original 1200 customers who understand that leaving the iSeries for any other platform while saying it is "difficult to operate and maintain" is simply not true. There was a time when my 4 year old son would go down and stuff a new tape in the model E20 we had so I could do a backup. I can tell you stories about school districts that have custodians start the backup and IPL the system at night. Difficult to operate and maintain? I don't think so.
No. Slick marketing by Sungard/Pentamation and the "siren call" of of GUI is what is leading them in the wrong direction. If they had any vision they would buy themselves an inexpensive 520 and continue to run CIMS until we finish our web replacement. Due by the end of next year.
Sorry for the extra, extra long post. But, I KNOW this story. Pete Helgren Steve Richter wrote:
I like that iSeries network is reporting the news on our platform, good and bad. Here is a link from their site to a newspaper article about a school board wanting to replace its as400 based student information system that is "difficult to operate and maintain". http://www.iseriesnetwork.com/content/f3/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.viewArticle&webID=1001&newsID=5021&issueID=5687&articleID=52343 http://www.standardspeaker.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1452&Itemid=2 -Steve
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