Re: SSA Interview -- BPCS-L

Bill

Some of this is borderline off-topic, but I felt supplying the list with these urls was a positive step. The articles illuminate a lot of SSA's future that has been quite cloudy, at least to me.

I only recently started subscribing to this publication
http://www.midrangeserver.com/mso/mso081903-story02.html

so I had not seen their earlier piece on SSA
http://www.midrangeserver.com/mso/mso021202-story02.html

It also had stuff that sounded very positive to me, and answered some key questions.

QUOTES What we want to do is become a more customer-facing organization. 90 percent of our revenue comes from the AS/400, iSeries product, so, obviously, from a development perspective, that's where we're going to start investing our money. We have a very good transaction system and a very good manufacturing system--probably better than any other on the market. We decided we had to extend the function, because-- especially in the midmarket--a customer wants an end-to-end solution. We believe that the iSeries is the best value you can get in any database or hardware platform around the world. Our customers are continuing to use it because of reliability.

Questions & Answers

How many BPCS users are there now? I think it had been around 6,500. We've just been doing an analysis on that. We believe we have just over 6,000 customers worldwide-- between 16,000 and 18,000 sites. The install base is not really shrinking. If you look at Tyco, one of our largest customers worldwide, they acquired about 20 companies, and seven or eight of those companies used BPCS. You get customer shrinkage because of the acquisitions. UNQUOTES

the Feb 2002 article is swearing by the partner strategy, which does not seem to be the focus of the latest article which included QUOTE "The world does not need another CRM or another ERP." UNQUTE You might like to know that I am firmly of the belief that the world does need other models for the development and sale of software, beyond those of commercial and open source. If other models provided decent competition, then perhaps captive audiences would be less in slavery. I have explored several models that I feel do not mesh well with my day job's corporate culture, because I think that as our company survives into the future there may be a need to move off of BPCS and I would like to find an alternative that does not have the same constraints as our current model.

I did not mean to imply that the bitching is about a fabrication. It is a vicious world out there, and as the number of ERP vendors gets smaller, it is going to get worse.

Several places throughout both articles it seems clear that they want to continue support and improvement for existing products, and those they have acquired. They talk about both improving products and profitability. A lot is pretty vague.

There was the statement specifically about not sunsetting stuff any more that I asked for, and got clarification on. Until I saw that statement, I had a different fearful belief about SSA long term plans.

They do recognize some areas in which BPCS is somewhat lacking, probably not all of them, and are working towards closing the gaps they are aware of.

One of the areas that SSA and its competition is in the toilet with (in my opinion), that they do not seem to have recognized, is the integration of engineering redesign (such as AUTO CAD) with BOM routings etc. That was the reason why an ERP software committee of about 100 companies, that I worked on, developed a design statement of what is needed. The industry association eventually went with the open source ERP model to try to solve that. I am not convinced that was the best approach, but it is promising that such a large number of companies agree on ERP flaws and can band together to try to do something about it. I do not feel that Open Source ERP can compete effectively with commercial ERP yet in terms of feature richness, but I am impressed that there are several Open Source ERP ventures out there that are rather mature, so that some day they will give commercial ERP as good a stimulus as Linux is now giving Microsoft.

I think that purchasing best of breed, and milking the max out of it, is a better course for SSA than a series of partnerships in which the customers have no idea what will be thrown away tomorrow in another deal. But it means greater monopoly leverage by SSA and its shrinking competition.

Perhaps we need to figure out how to get the DoJ to wake up while there still is some commercial competition left.

A few years ago, we were in semi panic dismay when SSA seemed hell bent on bankruptsy. Where were we going with this ERP our employers had hitched our futures to, often with our advice? Well now we know there is a future, a solid future for BPCS, so our past fears have been wiped away, but we still have lots to worry about.

Al Mac wrote:
> Some of what is being said does not seem to jive with some things a
> lot of
> people bitching about on this list in recent months ... it is
> prohibitively
> expensive to upgrade your AS/400 if you are no longer on their tech
> support.

Can you point to the article which addresses this point?  Believe me, what
people are "bitching" about is not a fabrication, it is a fact.

Bill

- Al Macintyre http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac Find BPCS Documentation Suppliers http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html BPCS/400 Computer Janitor at http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com/