RE: Staying current on releases? (was: Are there any System isites on the Internet that offer accounts?)

It also hurts in the area of pressures to move to another platform.

Some people think that moving to UNIX or MICROSOFT is a way out of the problem. I think they are mistaken, but some people still think that.

In a recent conversation with new corporate CFO, I likened this issue to vendors holding a shotgun to the heads of all their clients, where MY SOLUTION is to consider Open Source ERP instead of Commercial ERP. Even if you find an ERP company that is not doing this today, they may be bought out by another that does this.

I said that I had not thought Open Source ERP made sense in corporate past because it was not as well developed as today, and Open Source requires corporate culture competently able to tell the ERP how to work, instead of letting the ERP vendor tell us how to run our business.

Why can't IBM sell a new box and carry forward the old serial numbers? Is
there ANY reason technology-wise? This software pricing issue has got to be
hurting Rochester's sales numbers.

Chuck? You listening?

Paul Nelson
Office 512-392-2577
Cell 708-670-6978
nelsonp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: Al Mac Wheel

Identify the vendor packages that are like that, and how many sites are
supposedly on that package, to get an idea of the scale of the
problem. The main reason we are still on V5R1 is management refuses to pay
over 10 times the original purchase price of the package to get it on
another IBM CPU serial #.

While other people theoretically could access our reality, it will never
happen due to paranoia about some security concerns ... we have had some
incidents, leading to tighter security.

>I've
>also heard plenty of harping on this list about people who can't upgrade
>due to vendor package X costing an arm and a leg to upgrade.