Brian, you won't get too much disagreement from me on what you say. But two basic points:
1. Let's not confuse "cost" with "software price." The former doesn't have too much to do with the latter. I'm all for saving on software prices but not if it means increasing costs and/or risk. (I sometimes talk about "risk-adjusted total costs" as a concept which, again, I'm finding has very little to do with the acquisition prices of any capital ingredients.) 2. IBM Tivoli SA is a technical requirement for GDPS, so a lot of shops simply can't do without commercial automation software for technical reasons. I have to disagree when you talk about software vendors not investing in their products. I can't speak for any vendor in any official capacity, but boy we sure are investing more and more. (Has there ever been a time in recent memory with so much new mainframe software coming out and with such real new function? Why, they're releasing a 64-bit real addressing VSE, and even I'm surprised. Good times.) SA V3 just came out toward the end of last year, and we've hugely beefed up development efforts on the former Candle products. (IBM does not buy software companies to bury or to merely coast.) The fruits of that labor are already starting to ship in many instances. A lot of that effort goes into reducing the backlog of customer-requested features for the former Candle products. Some effort also goes into making sure the products tolerate and then exploit new middleware versions. (An excellent example is OMEGAMON XE and DB2 V8 monitoring. And here comes DB2 V9....) But now we're going past remediation and much more into the "customers haven't even thought to ask yet" territory. Sorry to sound like a commercial here, but your comment clashed pretty violently with my perspective. All that said, I think the original poster should examine all his options from every vendor, free or fee, if he's in a position to do so. No disagreement on that. I also see way too many customers buying software they don't need. I tell them to get rid of it. - - - - - Timothy F. Sipples Consulting Enterprise Software Architect, z9/zSeries IBM Japan, Ltd. E-Mail: [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
