Re: OS/400 V6R1 Cumulative PTFs -- MIDRANGE-L

re: Big Blue Jerks.

Perhaps, but consider this.

IBM Spends significant sums of money developing and maintaining IBM i. If you have a SWMA (Software Maintenance Agreement) then you are contributing to this effort. As a consequence you are entitled to updates and new versions as well as to work with them resolving issues and obtaining fixes. I think this is reasonably well understood.

Now suppose you do not pay. You wonder why it costs a lot of money to get back into support? Well if it didn't then many (Most?) customers would simply not pay support until they needed it. They'd sign up for a month, fix issues, do PTFs, then stop paying again. However they would still expect IBM to continue development and maintenance even when they aren't contributing funds to the effort.

So you say "WOW this old machine is Expensive!" YEP! So purchase a new POWER7 4 core at the P05 tier and save a ton of money on support and maintenance as well as getting fantastic performance.

Either way, IBM deserves revenue for the products they create and support!

IBM Hardware maintenance took this approach many years ago. If you call at 5:05PM on a Friday and you don't have a maintenance contract then you will be guaranteed a vist by Tuesday. TUESDAY? Yep, "Next Business Day" which starts on Monday since 50:05PM is past COB for Friday. Same rules, IBM invests in inventory, Customer Engineers, etc and must pay them all the time. Your maintenance contract supports that. Only paying when you need them doesn't allow IBM to keep them available to help you.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com
www.iInTheCloud.com

On 11/13/2013 11:33 PM, Shannon O'Donnell wrote:

Hi,

I have a used 520 that I was able to migrate to V6R1 before the support on
it ran out, but we did not think to order the cumulative PTFs or the
HIPERS, and all the Group PTFs while we still could under maintenance. We
had ordered V6R1 and then let it sit around for more than a year, well after
maintenance was up, before we loaded it on that system.

We do not use this system very much anymore so there did not seem to be any
sense in paying $3K a year in maintenance for it at the time. Recently,
however, we wanted to test some software on it and realized that we need to
apply all the PTFs, HIPERS and all the Group PTFs to do so. I checked
with our BP and it would cost us just under $5K to put the system back on
maintenance with IBM and that includes the penalty fee IBM forces on you
(big blue jerks). That's an outrageous fee for something we will only use
sporadically.

So before I give up entirely on using this box, I wanted to ask if there is
anyone out here who has all the latest (wouldn't even necessarily need to be
the LATEST! As no ptfs were applied for V6R1) Cumulative PTFs, all the Group
PTFs and all the HIPERS laying around on DVD/CD somewhere and could loan
them to us.

I would be glad to pay a reasonable fee and of course pay for shipping both
ways so I could get them back to you when we are done loading them.

Can anyone help me with this or is this just too far out there of a request?

If you want, please feel free to contact me off-list.

Thanks!

Shannon O'Donnell