Re: Help required to stop this company replacing their iSeries

On 6/30/06, Darrell A Martin <DMartin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Steve wrote:

"Let's hope the new sales managers at IBM, coming from the successful
p5 division of the company, will merge the i5 with the p5 and allow
i5/OS to run in a p5 partition. Overnight that would grow the i5/OS
market to millions? of installed p5 systems and give programmers a
reason to learn to program our system."

I'm not sure I follow the reasoning. This sounds too much like the CP/M
compatibility cards that were developed for the IBM PC in the mid-1980s.
That was probably a good idea, but the effect was NOT to extend the life
of CP/M or for that matter of applications written for CP/M. Instead, it
hastened adoption of hardware running PC-DOS a.k.a. MS-DOS. Then, when
users got PCs, they wanted to use software that was (perceived as) native
to it.

If i5/OS should be unlinked from the Series i hardware platform, the
scales will tip much more severely toward porting RPG apps to something
seen as more appropriate to the platform actually being used. That
something may be Java, but if so then why not just keep running the most
stable hardware platform in the business?

my guess is sql procedures are more widely used to write business
applications than Java is.  As a platform for database applications,
i5/OS is very good. In AIX you might use Perl and DB2 stored
procedures to write a database application. In i5/OS you would use
CLLE, db2 stored procedures and RPG.  There is a lot of room for
improvement in the CLLE part of this, but I think the comparison still
favors i5/OS.  We just need the p5 pricing of the hardware and
software to prove it.

-Steve