I sort of "specialize" in upgrading sites that have put off an upgrade to a more current OS for (quite) a while and I can tell you from experience with over 100 of these sites that there are LOTs of reasons for them being at that old release, and all (well, the vast majority any way) of them are not that they were lazy or stupid in any way.
Sometimes (about 35% if the time) it was actually the external vendors that are the major contributor that kept them from being able to upgrade. How, you might ask? Well, lets suppose have been using Adabas for 12 years and are paying $120K a year to SAG to run their software, and they made you an offer back in 2005 or so (when they (SAG) needed cash) that if you paid $600K in a one time charge, you would be able to run Adabas and Com-Plete and several other pieces of their suite "forever", don't laugh, I have seen the contracts. Then you find out a couple years down the line, that SAG will let you upgrade to new "releases" but not the "new" version(s). Well, actually they will, but there is a cost, and that cost might be $165k per year. You are upset, you argue with SAG for a year (or two) and then decide that you just won't deal with a company who acts like that. Unfortunately, you can't very well take on a 25 man-year project to convert to DB/2 and CICS, (which won't save you any money anyway), so you just stick with your old Adabas V7 and the old z/OS V1.4 that runs it quite nicely. (this is a true scenario at several sites by the way). You decide, the software works fine and does what you need (for now), so you "settle" for it. Then 8 to 12 years later, you are told by IBM that you just can't run the old mainframe hardware you have been running for 10 years any more, and they offer to make you a sweet deal on a z13s that will save you money on their (IBM's) software, plus they can kneecap the box so that it's EXACTLY the same speed as the old z/800. SAG has nothing to say about it, (actually they do, but the contract is on your side in this case) because you are running less than the total MSU's that you originally licensed, but to get to the z13s, you have to get off z/os 1.4. That's where I come in, and upgrade them to z/OS 1.13 (the highest level the z-series box they are running supported and the lowest level the z13s supported, and make the existing Adabas (Version 7 by the way) work on it. Then I move them to the z13s and upgrade z/OS once more to V2. Again keeping Adabas and all of it's products (Com-Plete, etc.) all exactly as they were (plus a few minor fixes to support the new underlying software). The only thing that made them "need" to upgrade was the z13s, not that the existing software needed them to. They were just as happy to use z/OS 1.4. It was doing everything they needed and were basically (while way outdated) content. I don't see them as wrong to have been okay with the old OS and vendor software. I didn't even mention that Compuware and 4 other vendors that this site used (two of which no longer even existed), also had similar "one time charge" deals that, while it didn't add up to the same amount of money, was still substantial), deals. This is not even a one time thing, this same EXACT scenario (same general hardware, same general OS software levels (basically, two of them were 1.5) and generally the same vendors) has happened 4 separate sites in the past 2 years. One moved to a z114 one to a bc12 and 2 to z13s's. Other reasons vary for the other sites that I have helped, but it's almost always some variation on lack of a good motivating factor to get them to move "forward" combined with several "good" reasons for NOT moving forward. In only a handful (maybe 3) of the over 100 sites was the reason a lack of expertise or ability to perform the work to stay "current". The problem becomes, after a certain point, (that they don't feel until it's long past), there is no longer a "easy" path to move forward. Some of the sites have the "hardware" reason, in that the hardware they bought can't go any higher, and they can't afford to acquire a new box for a while, and when they can afford it, they are too far back to perform the conversion, or at least they think so, because the "conventional IBM wisdom", (which was never true by the way) was that you can't jump more than two z/OS releases at a time. First of all, IBM never really said that, and secondly, it's just plain silly. That was enough though to stop people from converting when they thought they were staring at not one, not two, but possibly as many as 4 conversions, back to back. Sadly, even though IBM knows it's not true about jumping no more than one release, they didn't come forward with that information, (and actually fought me on it in many client meetings once I had the conversion contract(s)) in time to help anyone. Also, you would probably be surprised (maybe not) to find that there are still over 500 sites that are "back level". Brian ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
