RE: Help required to stop this company replacing their iSeries

Steve,

Don't do it!  don't try to convince them not to replace the iSeries.  If
you start out with that as your goal, you will quickly become
marginalized and find yourself on the outside of the conversation
looking in.

Instead, I think you ought to embrace the project and dive right in -
find out why they think the current application (not "the iSeries") is
not up to the task and attempt to address that problem.

The fact of the matter is that hardware is becoming more and more
commoditized, and should therefore be less and less of a factor in
business decisions about business applications.  So find out what the
right business application is, and help the users choose the best one
for their workload.  Once they have landed on a business application,
then they should go out and shop for hardware that it will run on.  And
seeing that more and more applications run on System i, the odds are
pretty good that System i will fill the hardware bill.

And as you go through the application, note the perceived deficiencies
in the current application, and look for their counterparts in any new
applications.  My experience is that a lot of "System change outs" are
more driven by "technology  religion" (and emotion), and when you apply
logic and scientific analysis, the stated reasons to change begin to
evaporate.

that's my .02

jte



--
John Earl | Chief Technology Officer
The PowerTech Group
19426 68th Ave. S
Seattle, WA 98032
(253) 872-7788 ext. 302
john.earl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
www.powertech.com 
Celebrating our 10th Anniversary Year!
 

 
This email message and any attachments are intended only for the use of
the intended recipients and may contain information that is privileged
and confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, any
dissemination, distribution, or copying is strictly prohibited. If you
received this email message in error, please immediately notify the
sender by replying to this email message, or by telephone, and delete
the message from your email system.
--

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-
bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Raby, Steve
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 1:48 AM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Help required to stop this company replacing
their iSeries

Hello Chaps and Chapesses,

I was on this list last year, and left the company I was
with to go contracting for GEAC, not knowing of the
imminent take over. But I digress, that is not the
problem, I have recently taken a contract here in the
Netherlands at a place that has a fairly new iSeries(year
or so old I think) on 5.2. The system they have was
written in house over the last 10-12 years in RPGIII and I
am in the process of helping them bring it up to date and
I am trying to help that along further using what little I
know of RPGIV/ILE. The guy here is really enthusiastic to
learn all he can from me (in exchange he is teaching me
ASP and HTML), the problem is now they had a meeting here
yesterday and horror of horrors they are talking of
replacing the iSeries with some other system, oracle or
some such rubbish, over the next couple of years.

So the help we require is how do we convince them not to
replace the iSeries? We need to build up a business case
(I think money is the biggest consideration for them) and
any help anyone can give us would be most appreciated. It
is not that I am scared for my contract, there is enough
work to keep me going for a few years even if they do
decide to change, I just dont want to see another iSeries
shop bite the dust.

I hope this is the right list to mention this on and my
apologies if not.

Thanks in advance

Steve Raby
--
This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
(MIDRANGE-L) mailing list
To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit:
http://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/midrange-l
or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Before posting, please take a moment to review the
archives
at http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l.