RE: IBM Extended Hardware Support Question for iSeries

I don't disagree. But while it is expensive, eventually the customer will finally be forced to deal with it. They can deal with it in a planned, rational, lower risk way, or they can wait until they are forced to deal with it on an impossible deadline with no preparation.

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of DrFranken
Sent: Thursday, November 1, 2018 1:46 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: IBM Extended Hardware Support Question for iSeries

Technical debt sounds like a made up thing but wow is it true. And it takes many forms in the data center. One of my customer realized they needed a new generator, UPS, CRAC, and server all in the same year. But the room was now only 25% full. The savings by not purchasing the first three items and putting the new server in the cloud paid for the cloud for many years. The electrical savings from not running those items paid for many more months. It becomes a leveraging point for a change.

When it's software though it's more traumatic to the company to change.
Moving hardware (mostly) is an IP address change. Moving software is finding the proper replacement, purchase price, planning, implementation, data migration and training. And more training. And then finding out what it is that you missed when finding the package!! A couple orders of magnitude more expensive than the hardware move.


- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 11/1/2018 2:22 PM, Brian May wrote:

Regardless of how the company got to their current situation, they have accumulated or inherited "technical debt". There is only so far you can kick that can down the road before you have to deal with it. Eventually, that package, whatever it may be, HAS to be replaced. It's only a matter of when and how.

Unfortunately, when situations like this happen as IN FORmerly mentioned example, it leaves a bad taste in the customer's mouth and can lead them away from the platform entirely instead of away from said vendor.

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Thomas
Garvey
Sent: Thursday, November 1, 2018 12:33 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: IBM Extended Hardware Support Question for iSeries

Pointing the finger of fault isn't going to help since the decisions could have been by people long gone, or even with prior owners.
Upgrading software isn't an option as vendors could be long gone as well.
Replacement might seem an (expensive) possibility but replacing software that is used simply to maintain archive applications is unlikely.
Current owners/operators trying to do their due diligence are left with only crazy expensive futures that are just a roll of the dice on whether the hardware will survive.

Best Regards,


On 11/1/2018 12:14 PM, Rob Berendt wrote:

"Can't" is an invalid word.

Just using your example, these people COULD have paid for maintenance.
But, no, they didn't want to. So now they blame the results of their
poor decision on the software vendor.
They have options.
Upgrade the vendor package, at a premium price.
Replace the vendor package.
Sell their business to someone who knows more, they've milked the
cash cow dry. And hope they pass the due diligence portion of it.



Rob Berendt

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