One thing the legal department needs to be asked about: How long
do they have to be able to reproduce reports/documents or be able
to do a report?
Now, will the new system be able to process the old system's data
for that period, or will some arrangement need to be made to do
this with their data? And on what media with what format will
that data need to be kept?
Meanwhile, I've read much of what others were saying and I agree
with the majority. And I say that having been involved with
several "modernization" upgrades -- Euphemism for getting off a
mainframe.
Sometime one should draw two pictures. The one should be a
conceptual diagram of a non-mainframe system (generally
bus-centric) and then a mainframe system (typically, RAM or
Memory Centric). Don't identify the two architectures. And ask
which one they would want to be using for their system to process
all their data.
Now it is OK to label the bus between CPUs and memory as being
256 bytes wide. The bus from memory to IOPs is about 64 bytes wide.
The non-mainframe buses are 8 bytes to 16 bytes wide (64 to 128
bits) as I recall (I think certain machines are now multiplexing
the Data Bus).
Again, this is conceptual because of PCIe, the bus may be split
into "channels" of 8-32bits wide (off the top of my head).
The drawing I did were for a few people that were just absolutely
sure that the sales people from the vendor's offices were correct
that they could run rings around a mainframe.
Once I explained clock speeds, bus widths, cache sizes, they were
just astonished. And then they realized my estimates of how many
machines they were going to need to replace their small mainframe
was probably closer to reality.
If you get the chance, you should ask the CFO at what point would
the migration have to stop? Or have they even considered a
financial hard stop point?
Now, if they were doing a migration to another system where they
were going to use all packaged software, they would probably meet
their deadlines and hit their budget numbers. But if they aren't
doing that, but are going to migrate your systems to the other
platform using a bunch of programmers --- You are paying for a
one off software development project. That is, you are buying a
one off software development project and then financing the project.
Regards,
Steve Thompson
On 05/03/2017 08:57 AM, Allan Staller wrote:
From previous experience (with another vendor),
Beware of any promises made by sales team (sales, tech marketing,....).
If (whatever it is) is promised and agreed to, ensure it is written into the
contract with an appropriate penalty for non-performance (up to and including
cancellation of the contract w/refund).
Of course it would be up to your legal team to ensure proper contract contents.
<SNIPPAGE>
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