John, You can contact me offline if you wish and I can look into why you're not getting an SAP on z proposal from IBM. That bothers me, absent more information at least. I am not aware of any particular size issues like you describe. In terms of company revenue, Baldor (SAP on z) is quite a bit smaller than you are, I would expect. I'm located where your corporate parent is if that's convenient.
Sometimes the basis for comparison is skewed. If, for example, you (or your bosses, in particular) profess not to care about such "mundane" issues as disaster recovery, or at least forget about it when making a purchasing decision, then you can get some strange results. If you don't care about qualities of service even slightly then the mainframe might be at a disadvantage. A common pattern (unfortunately) is that businesses forget about QoS, implement SAP in one manner, then come back and say, "I guess we do care" and reimplement. (We have a number of cases like that.) That epiphany might come the first time there's a database version upgrade or patch when the factory runs 24 hours a day, to pick an example. I suppose that reimplementation is "good" business for somebody's services team, but I wouldn't recommend that pattern if you can avoid it. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Specializing in Software Architectures Related to System z Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan and IBM Asia-Pacific 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
