Hi,
> Steven Spencer
> If the cloud is down, and you do not have a puter onsight, you
are immediately dead in the water.
Nathan
I suspect that you're really underplaying how much your business
already depends on the Internet, and if not, then I suspect that
you're really missing out on many revenue-generating and cost-saving
opportunities.
Steven
And I suspect that you really do not know our business, or
international trade. The net is auxiliary. Those are the "facts on
the ground". And afaik this is true for all the big players in our
industry, and there are very sound reasons. Purchasing is all done,
on both ends, on a person-to-person basis. The net presence can be
an aid (especially to the salesman in finding new customers) but it
has little to do with our business.
One little secret. Any industry where prices are very flexible based
on a wide variety of factors, on orders than can be tens of thousands
of dollars, or purchases that can be a million dollars, simply cannot
place the prices and ordering on the web. They are still in the
dark ages of email, and fax, and PDF and excel. And they work very
fine, thank you.
Nathan
But my main point is that there is so much redundancy in Internet
infrastructure now that your point about it going down is overstated
if not invalid. In most cases it's more probable that an on-sight
system goes down. It wasn't always that way, I admit. But we've
entered a new era.
Steven
We have never had a major event, like EMP and solar flares or nuclear
this and that, that disrupted internet communication on a major
scale. The moment that happens, all bets are off
Nathan
> What do you do when you want to hire a new employee and the only
space left in the building is the computer room?
Steven
They stuck me in a storage room while waiting to expand the
building. But the industrial owner of the building, went bankrupt,
so months have become a year or two.
Nathan
> We had a customer that had their AS/400 in their lobby until a
toddler who accompanied a parent walked over one day and turned off
the power switch.
Steven
And it took 15 minutes to plug it back in and get up and running, I'm
sure. However, I do not recommend the puter in the lobby (mostly
because of security, not toddlers).
Nathan
Bob Cancilla, who used to work for IBM Rational, and used to be an
IBM i evangelist has more recently been proclaiming in forums all
over the place that the IBM i ecosystem will collapse, perhaps
within a few years, and he lays a lot of the blame on RPG
programmers and our mind-set. Personally I think Bob is better at
selling migration services than predicting the future, but he does
make a few good points.
Steven
And I think any RPG blame is on the dancing of IBM. Visual RPG,
Zend and PHP, EGL, etc. It was their inability to get it together
than threatens long-term viability in the marketplace.
As for EGL .. my earlier question, can it do those pop-up file
inquiry buttons easily in coordination with RPG ? Presumably you
could modify the RPG code to work with the EGL pop-up ? Such simply
seems very un-4GL In other words, you lose any 4GL capabilities if
you are using EGL as the SDA to the web and combining the two
languages. This looks to me as a real question, and I will look at
the LinkedIn Thread.
The iSeries overall is doing fine, despite the Cancilla predictions
in 2009. I tend to doubt that OS/400 (I5/OS) operating system is
threatened in any way, although it is possible that the old RPG-36
environment could be ended.
=======================
As for the Cancilla Cloud article, it seems silly on a major point.
Move to the Cloud
http://cancillaoni.blogspot.com/2012/01/move-to-cloud.html
This goes on the presupposition that real solid small businesses can
use a canned cloud package.
"It is the responsibility of the cloud vendor to keep both their
hardware and software current with the latest vendor fixes and insure
that they have stable reliable operating environment. Translate that
to read you do not need system support people."
"Their software" .. may not run your business anywhere near as
efficiently as your current software.
(Note: our full yearly IT minicomputer budget is probably way below
90K. Even adding in our 20 PCs and their server, we probably are
only in that range. When you have a good system running a tight,
solid business, it simply does not need a stable of programmers.
Cancilla's analysis simply does not apply here.
Steven Spencer
Queens, NY
midrange.com
