> It's ironic that IBM's latest innovation (i.e. Linux/390) and potentially it's most important factor in new hardware sales depends entirely upon the "ugly step-sister" to help Linux/390 achieve it's full potential.
All zSeries machines are dependent on PR/SM - which is nothing more than CP under the covers - and SIE. > I worked as a consultant to a division of IBM for about 7 years (most of the 1990's). During this time there was a published mandate that ALL IBM business processes (including the ones which I authored and was supporting, on VM of course) were to be migrated off of VM to Lotus Notes. Any business process that would not or could not migrate off of VM to Lotus Notes would be retired. Not so much a pogrom of VM - more a desperate attempt to get some value out of the Lotus acquisition - when Lou Baby paid $3.5 billion for a company with listed assets of around $88 million. One of said assets being the frequency with which the exectutives' toilet bowls were wiped out with disinfectant. (Think I'm joking? Check out the last 10K before Lotus was acquired.) > A LOT of great internal business processes were "retired" resulting in a huge loss of functionality and productivity. A lot more were moved to SAP R/3 with an even greater loss. I'm told they can't even produce a list of installations by licensed software at present. One of the reasons the IBM Licence Manager is late is that it has to interface with internal systems that didn't produce any software invoices for four months at one point. > Anyhow, that's just my $.02. I'm glad to know that VM is still alive and well, and that the folks who maintain and enhance it are still doing an outstanding job! As I say, the record doesn't bear you out. VM pricing has remained reasonable - if they were trying to kill it, you'd think they'd have hiked the price. V4 was even the first operating system to get per-engine OTC prices, which I expect to spread right across IBM's software portfolio over the coming year or so. And if I look at the enhancement record (see, for instance, Announcement Letter 299-201 as an example) I don't see any lack of progress in supporting new features. All competitive platforms (starting back with Amdahl, but now including Sun and the iSeries) are looking for a competitive edge in partitioning. VM is the ultimate in soft partitioning and allows zSeries to maintain an undisputed lead over 'hard' partitiong schemes. -- Phil Payne The Devil's IT Dictionary - last updated 2002/01/20: http://www.isham-research.com/dd.html UK +44 7785 302803 Germany +49 173 6242039
