You guys put out some really good points there. We are a midsize company (growing fast!) and we put in a z800, running z/ VM as a hypervisor for Linux, and are porting the business apps over to it. Naturally, we could not do it the way everyone else does it... so it is taking longer than we would like, but the results - ah... they are fantas tic.
But the fact that we can do this- and that we do not have to pay signifig ant monthly license costs to IBM, while good for us, is a killer for IBM's ca sh flow. They have not yet learned how to deal with customers our size. For example - when we bought the z, we purchased it on a "TSO" plan, and paid cash for the Z, Shark, tapes and the whole bundle. We still get thr ee or four invoices per month for it. The money and effort IBM wastes sendin g those out, not to mention the time and effort expended to correct the errors, is astronomical. They could afford it if we were sending them $130K/month in license fees, but ... IBM has to learn how to deal, profitably, with the thousands of companies our size and slightly smaller. They are always shooting themselves in the ir own foot. Another example, when we first contacted IBM about buying a new computer, I told our sales rep we were interested in a mainframe or a pSeries machine , knowing the entire time we wanted a mainframe. They showed up and told us we were too small for a mainframe. <grin> The truth was they could not find the proper people to sell us the mainframe, and the sales rep they first set us up with was unwilling to do the work to get a proper order placed. He felt that we should simply take whatever he said, at whatever he said the cost was going to be. He also did not think we had any idea what we were talking about using Linux. You don't want to know the stories about the printing people or what the printing people did -- I do believe they wound up disbanding the entire group... (*sigh*) On the other hand, individuals within IBM are some of the greatest people I have ever met. Most of them are truely out there to do the job, and a lot of them are interested in interesting things. What better group of people is there on the planet? I think they are nervous to no end about Hercules, to be honest. I do not think they beleived it could happen, and yet, it has. How can they protec t their revenue source? Restrictive license policies does work, but it als o has the capability of backfiring - people will move more and more to Linu x. And while Linux does not have the same VM capabilities in it as zVM does, that could also change. IBM's greatest nightmare would be people buying j ust zSeries hardware with no software at all. And there is a real possibility that could happen if they don't change their course a bit. And oh yeah, don't forget about the group inside IBM who is still convinc ed that the Mainframe is DEAD, and can be easily replaced with a coulpe pSer ies boxes. Of course that isn't so, but they are loud, vocal, and have just enough truth in their statements to make people listen. -Paul
