Now THAT really is a heart warming story. After I've printed it I need to
find a frame to put it in.
Thanks for sharing it!
Dave Salt
SimpList(tm) - The easiest, most powerful way to surf a mainframe!
http://www.mackinney.com/products/SIM/simplist.htm
From: Brian Westerman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU>
To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Moving BACK to the mainframe
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2006 20:01:29 -0500
I have been reading this string with a lot of interest. For the past 10
years or so, the company I work for has made a LOT of money moving people
"BACK to the mainframe" after their failed attempts to migrate things to a
"client/server" and in a some of cases to some other even lesser platforms.
I went to our client profile list and did some cursory checking and found
that we have more than 50 that have been "moved back" to the mainframe just
in the past 7 years (it gets harder to tell from the notes that are older
than that) 22 of them were my client sites that I worked with, and I was
very surprised because I hadn't really counted them at the time. I can
remember at one time in the 90's wondering if I could start moving my
skills
set to more Unix-centric, and I actually had to attend a bucnh of classes
over a span of several months, but it was to be able to move people BACK to
the mainframe not to help them off of it. We actually had a special "Sale
Price" offer a couple of years ago to manage the migration back to the
mainframe that worked very well for us and the companies that contracted
with us to handle their "re-migration".
I can remember a lot of horror stories from these clients about how much
money was wasted and how many people were lost (both because they freely
left and because management fired a bunch, some because they "thought" they
were no longer necessary and some for loosing so much money) and all of the
sleepless nights that they had.
The really funny thing was that in all of the sites that we moved back, we
didn't have even one failure to get them back on the mainframe, but you
hear
about failures to move off of the mainframe all the time. In all cases, the
cost to operate back on the mainframe was less than they were spending (or
had spent) on the other platforms, and actually because pricing and cost of
hardware had changed, the cost was less then they used to pay on their old
mainframe before the failed migration took place. Most of the sites saw
the
initial savings on IBM hardware and Software, and never stopped to add up
all of the costs for the NEW hardware and software that they had to
acquire,
and the fact that it tended to break (A lot).
We get pretty spoiled on the mainframe end of things with how reliable
things are and I think sometimes we "project" that reliability to some of
the other platforms where it simply doesn't exist. Not that there aren't
some reliable platforms, but the ones that are reliable just aren't all
that
cheap, so there is no savings either.
Brian
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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
