On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 17:34, Steve Richter<stephenrichter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
do you have competitors also selling IBM i solutions?
All of our competitors are Windows-based. Before i switched to this
company, there were more companies selling IBM i solutions here, but
many software vendors have migrated their applications to Windows or a
platform neutral language called Java. Usually, these applications
were worse after the switch, as they lost a lot of business knowledge
when they dropped their "AS/400" programmers and replaced them with
graduates.
We didn't, our developers decided to modernize their application based
on IBM i technology to deliver modern applications directly from the
IBM i. Basically, they wrote 5250 with a GUI - enabling us to run all
the business code directly on the IBM i (written in ILE RPG, with
service programs and all the fancy stuff which i know little about).
Here's a screenshot, for anyone interested:
http://projectdream.org/~lb/diasnc.png
The "code" on the bottom is what the client and the server talk about
And yes, i have a high deal of respect for our developers. None of
them are "stuck" at RPG, but also developing the Windows based client
in .NET/C#, and our general purpose Java client (which, truth to be
told, isn't as good as the Windows native client).
If you are representative of your company, then your
company is very competent.
Well, thanks :)
Your customers may not be choosing the IBM
i platform as much as they are selecting your expertise and the high
quality of the application software.
But isn't this what it always was about? Selling a good solution to
the customer? If you have a compelling product on the IBM i right now,
the biggest issue you face in the market is price-price-price.
Especially for smaller projects, the 30-40kCHF you need for an entry
level IBM i are off-putting, making it difficult to gain smaller
projects. But in many cases, they prefer buying or product with the
more expensive hardware simply because they think our product is
better than our competitors.
I'm sure with hardware pricing 10% higher than System x, we could gain
a lot more customers each year.
midrange.com
