Timothy Sipples wrote:
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.
My understanding of how the IBM world works today is that
the largest 600 IBM customers are actually handled by IBM
salespeople who are really IBM employess. Everyone else is
"served" by VARs. Maybe the OP's VAR is doing cherry picking,
only bothering to go after the clients with the most potential
net revenue. It's not your father's IBM any more.
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]
Kind regards,
-Steve Comstock
The Trainer's Friend, Inc.
303-393-8716
http://www.trainersfriend.com
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