>For example, Sabre (airline reservations, Travelocity) cut its total >expenses 50% when it switched from mainframe to Unix.
I do not have any particular knowledge of Sabre, so I would assume absent any information to the contrary that they're wonderful people. But I do have a problem with whoever this poster is. I would advise everyone to turn their marketing BS detectors to maximum when you see claims like these. Always sanity check them. It's really quite easy to do. Sabre Holdings went private in early 2007 (in a buyout by Silver Lake and Texas Pacific Group), but they did publish their full year 2006 financial results. Between 2005 and 2006 their operating expenses *increased* 12.3%, while total revenues increased a more modest 12.0%. The comparable figures are +20.7% and +18.3% for the year prior (2005 v. 2004). You can find these data on their Web site. When your costs increase faster than your revenues you suffer declining gross margins in your business. Perhaps somebody could check prior years to see if any of them show a 50% decrease in operating expenses. (I seriously doubt it.) It might also be interesting to see margin trends, especially relative to peer competitors. Here's another sanity check. The biggest corporate operating expense is generally payroll. Sabre reported having about 9,000 employees at the end of 2006. If you assume each employee has a fully burdened expense of $150,000 -- probably about right -- then that would be an annual total expense of $1.35 billion. That amount is more than half of Sabre's entire operating expenses for 2006, which makes sense given Sabre's business. In other words, for the poster's claim to be true Sabre would either have to fire almost every employee (without hiring replacement contractors) or slash every non-payroll cost to zero. (The latter wouldn't quite make the goal, actually.) So they'd either have buildings, equipment, and other assets with no employees to operate them, or they'd have 9,000 employees who don't have a single computer among them. Anybody think either case is realistic? :-) Look, if there are numerous and frequent strong business cases for moving off the mainframe, why does this particular individual (at least) have to fall back on ridiculous claims that are rather easily disproved by just checking corporate annual reports? Why not just present honest facts if the facts are so wonderful? Should a rational person believe any other claims from such a person? (Again, I don't know much about Sabre, so I don't even know if they "switched from mainframe to Unix.") That said, I do agree with one thought: there's choice and competition in where to run workloads. As a reminder, my opinions are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer or anyone else. - - - - - 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
