Making software purchase decisions based on emotional reactions to how the vendor spends its marketing dollars is not a recipe for IT success.
Compuware may well have determined after a long and detailed analysis that the Super Bowl was a cost-effective medium for them. I don't know, but I suspect your management did not know either. It's great that they found a cost-effective replacement that worked for them. They should have undeertaken the search based on their business needs, not based on how Compuware spends its advertising budget, and presumably years sooner. I do like "Super Bowel" however. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Edward Gould Sent: Wednesday, June 7, 2017 8:45 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Nice article about MF and Government > On Jun 7, 2017, at 7:38 AM, Knutson, Samuel <samuel.knut...@compuware.com> > wrote: > > The article is I think useful and addresses the critical need to wisely > modernize on the mainframe platform where it serves citizens today in the USA. > > https://www.fedscoop.com/what-is-legacy-it-and-how-scared-should-we-be > -of-it/ > > It wasn't written by just any person from Compuware but the CEO Chris > O'Malley. Chris has been a mainframe champion for years, drove the > turnaround of the mainframe products at CA with Mainframe 2.0 and is a > formidable leader. It's no surprise that I followed Chris to Compuware. > You can find him on Twitter https://twitter.com/chris_t_omalley and LinkenIn > where he blogs often about the mainframe and more > https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophertomalley Chris writes his own blogs > and tweets and is a fierce advocate for mainframe. While I do not know Chris O’Malley, he may be a fine person, I do not know. Having said that COMPUWARE has and always had a strong hold on certain parts of the MF market, until about 30 years ago was to a point of being greedy. One of the installations I worked at was a major bank and they were always grossing about COMPUWARE costs. One January (long time ago) Compare had an ad on TV during the Super Bowl. That is what it took to break the camels back, Our management was so MAD that the Monday after the game we were all summoned into a meeting and were told in no uncertain terms to get rid of all COMPUWARE products and telling us it had to be done soon! We walked out of the meeting pretty amazed as nothing like this had ever happened before. We started in immediately calling vendors and one of our European subsideraries came up with product X. We called the vendor immediately and got pricing which was fantastically inexpensive. We ordered a trial and tested it out and nothing we could throw at it could not faze it. Plug compatible down to a dime. We bought a license and installed it on one of our machines and they (the end users) couldn’t tell the difference. Upper management was ecstatic. All our bosses got a little bit extra in bonuses that year. I didn’t witness the conversations with the Compuware people but they were not happy. It was the most smoothest conversions ever I have witnessed. That will teach COMPUWARE about spending our money on Super Bowel advertisements paid with our money. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
