RE: DB and App Agnosticism on theiSeries(thinkingabout:Questionabout UDB on iSeries) -- MIDRANGE-L

> From: McKown, John
> 
> Sorry, but what does SSA stand for? Social Security Administration is
> all that I know of, and I doubt that is the subject of this
discussion.

SSA was the largest AS/400 software company in the world.  They had
arguably the most successful ERP package ever developed, and were in the
process of changing the face of the iSeries with graphical applications
-- five years before anybody heard of the World Wide Web.  The fact that
you didn't recognize the letters SSA shows how far the mighty have
fallen -- and is a cautionary note about "going platform independent".

SSA was indeed the biggest fish in the rather large pond of AS/400 ERP
systems.  The company was growing steadily, announcing a 3-for-2 stock
split nearly every year.  And then came the FUD.  Executive management
was convinced -- not through real numbers, or through any sort of case
studies, but through pure buzzword BS -- that the AS/400 was dead, and
they had to move to Unix/SQL or perish.  And thus they started a project
to make their product "platform independent".

And they already had a headstart... the bulk of their code was developed
using a code generator, so theoretically all they had to do was "tweak
the generator" to generator C code.

The move was a failure.  First, Unix simply didn't (and still doesn't)
support the wonderful inter-program communications capabilities of RPG
(that's even more the case now with ILE).  Unix also didn't support the
many work management features iSeries folks take for granted... little
things like job queues and output queues and message queues.  Not to
mention overrides and data queues and shared data paths and so on and so
on.

But it wouldn't have been as catastrophic, I don't think, if SSA hadn't
also "dumbed down" the original package in order to make the move
happen.  Rather than cause the generator to convert native I/O to a C
equivalent, they converted all the database I/O to embedded SQL.  (This
is where I have firsthand knowledge of why CHAINs cannot simply be
blindly converted to SELECT statements.)

Because of this, the package ran like a dog, even natively.  Thus, by
attempting to convert a top-of-the-line enterprise suite that took
advantage of the machine it ran on to a "DB and App agnostic" solution
that could run anywhere, they quite successfully managed to kill two
birds with one stone.  The Unix version was stillborn (to the point that
it actually caused lawsuits) and the original package died with it.  And
so did the company.

It has since been bought out by an IT scavenger, Gores Technology,
reborn as SSAGT, and having been refocused on its core business
strategies, it's doing quite well, thank you.  It has now actually
managed to get to the concept of supporting multiple platforms, but
through acquisition and integration of other products, not by trying to
create a "run anywhere" package.

Joe