On Tue, 26 Jul 2005 08:31:56 -0700, Edward E. Jaffe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >I must be missing something. Why do you consider it good news that an >installation runs obsolete mainframe hardware and software? Wouldn't it >be better if they upgraded to z/OS?? I struggled with this a little also, Ed. But I think that Hal's comments are probably pretty accurate. It's quite possible that they just can't afford anything else at this point. Hopefully they won't stay backlevel for so long that it becomes utterly impossible to get an upgrade done in the future. The IBM partisan in me likes the fact that they're still buying software on the platfrom. The mainframe evangelist in me likes that they're still on the right computing platform. But the pragmatist (cynic?) in me says "shoot, they'll probably let this languish so long that they'll eventually just make an uninformed decision and move off-platform because of a lack of an accurate TCO analysis", which is what we often see with installations that are way, way behind on zSeries (z9) technology. My personal gig is enterprise transformation, where I work with customers on architecture scenarios for taking existing workloads and turning them into web services, doing code reuse, etc. It's *very* hard to do that when your infrastructure is back-level. So it's almost a self-fufilling prophecy. Pretty hard to do something like XML enablement of a COBOL program when you're running an OS release and/or compiler that won't support parsing, for example. Bill Seubert zSeries Software I/T Architect IBM Corporation [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
