RE: DB and App Agnosticism on the iSeries (thinking about:Questionabout UDB on iSeries) -- MIDRANGE-L

Joe,

Thanks for the feedback.  I have been pondering your points here, still
digesting them, but have a few responses in the meantime:

I am trying to see where the ethical sticking point is in the first comment
about "selling somebody the best solution as opposed to simply making money
off of whatever they choose to buy".  It is not what I want, it is what the
customer wants.  It is the best solution FOR THEM and regardless of what I
may think about their IQ levels when they choose someone else's solution,
they chose the best solution for them.  My job is to listen carefully to
what they want and then present my solution as the best fit for their
requirements. There is nothing unethical about having a flexible enough
product to fit variable requirements. We provide "a solution" and, NO
company has the "best" solution because that is what upgrades and
enhancements are for, "bettering" the solution.  The "best solution" is a
constantly moving target because of changing organizational requirements and
changing technology.  It may be best today but tomorrow it is passé.  So the
best solution is a mythical beast who's characteristics are transitory at
best.  So all business transactions are closer to the "whatever they choose
to buy" category and I don't see an ethical problem with selling solutions
in that mode as long as everyone is fully informed.

You'll get no argument from me that the iSeries is the most reliable,
scalable, flexible, easy to manage server platform on the planet.  It is the
preferred platform in all cases. Perhaps I am naïve, since I am not the on
responsible for sales and marketing in the organization, but I perceive that
it is difficult to sell an iSeries into a WinTel shop (for example) because
of the perception that the iSeries IS different than a WinTel box.  Maybe
not.  Perhaps the perception in most DP shops is "Heck, give me whatever
hardware-O/S you have, as long as it is reliable and stable, we'll learn how
to operate it". I suppose that if a DP shop can overcome the limitations and
difficulties of WinTel and Linux, then an iSeries should be "cake" for them.
But I don't know how to reconcile the popularity of Windows and Linux with
the relative obscurity of the iSeries.  If the iSeries IS the "best
solution", we are either pretty poor marketers and sales people, the general
DP population has an average IQ below room temperature, or for "bad" reasons
people continue to buy bad operating systems.  

There was fairly good discussion about all this after the i5
announcement(s).  I really wish the iSeries was the predominate player in
server arena, but it isn't.

Your points about the costs of developing and supporting cross platform
applications are good ones.  Do you know of any publicly available
statistics on that?  I agree that all of those things have to be considered
and I really never thought about trying to locate a successful company that
has cross platform applications.  I would think that DB's would fall into
that category though.  With the exception of MS Sequel Server, most of the
major DB players are cross platform aren?t they?  I wonder why they would
have sought to run on multiple platforms, being platform agnostic, if it
wasn't profitable for them?

As it turns out, price point isn't an issue since we are an open source
development company and don't charge for the software. Hmmm, now that I
think about it, it is the service revenue, support subscriptions, custom
programming and system integration that we charge for and those are exactly
the things you say are most costly in a cross platform environment.  So
maybe we do have a business model to follow.  Just making sure that we cover
the additional costs of supporting those multiple platforms would be the
thing to monitor.
 
Still, more to think about.

Tom, your points are well taken.  Although the ASP environment hasn't grown
as much as the early hype suggested it would, it is a good model to be
evaluated.  And, if I WAS running an ASP hosted service, I would want to run
it on an iSeries.


Peter Helgren
Value Added Software, Inc
801.581.1154 x202