Re: Prometheus

Trevor Perry wrote:

Yes, you ~did~ miss the point. By many miles.

A customer with a ~small~ iSeries or AS/400 is NOT using XML or WAS to the degree you suggest. There are applications that are written in green code that are feature rich and do not need middleware to gobble up the CPW. These customers are the audience for a smaller i5 - not the ones who are writing slow applications with VB connections to an i.

On your other point, selling a System p is not at all profitable for IBM compared to selling a System i. And, selling a System p to System i customers who are on a green screen ERP application will cost them huge effort and money to convert or replace their application.

Selling a server with a much smaller profit margin, and migrating FROM a System i - NOT a good deal. Not even close.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Richter,Steve"

Subject: RE: Prometheus

-----Original Message-----
From: Trevor Perry [mailto:tperry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, May 30, 2006 4:53 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Prometheus

Wow! Did you miss the point.

I have MANY customers running at 100CPW or close. Their applications are
feature RICH, and they need only a little more CPW - just a server
modernization for new features. To suggest they should depart the platform
is ludicrous. With a server that will run their original AS/400
applications, and can also get them to the web without having to add

servers, etc, they will be able to run their SMB business for years to come.

I have XML code that runs on a 485 CPW system that can take many minutes to run when the document gets over 10 meg in size. Where I worked recently, on a 570 with 2 cores we were doing a lot of work with VB code that called SQL procedures on the 570 and got result sets back in return. The response time of that code was barely acceptable. I dont see how a 100 CPW system will be able to return result sets to a PC client VB program with decent response time.

( another example. I am approaching 1 minute on a 485 CPW system to create a service program. Why should I have to limit the number of procedures I have or divide them up into many service programs? Just because the system is so CPW starved? That is no way to sell a modern computer system. )

In my example with the result sets returned from the sql procedures the code ran slow mostly because the sql procedures were doing a lot of work and they could have been more efficient ( things like creating files in qtemp, etc ). But why bother? If the system is priced per user then we could just throw another cheap but powerful CPU core at the problem. IBM makes the same amount of money and the customer is happy because they dont have to spend thousands of dollars to have their code rewritten.

The p5 is successful and it's system software ( db2 ) is sold per user. IBM makes money and the customers are buying a lot of p5s. A good deal all around, no?

-Steve