Hello all, This is an interesting subject. I remember reading several years ago that TI (Texas Instruments) spent $50 million on SAP and gave up. SAP must be a bear to implement but TI should have known better.
I have personal knowledge of several migrations/conversions that didn't go so well. All of them suffered due to under estimating the amount of work involved. Of course, a lot of the work was due to the sloppiness of the old code, multiple and obsolete programs, program bugs, etc. But the primary cause of the under estimate was the eagerness of the sales person(s) to get the deal and not listen to the programmers. An Universe to jBASE migration project was abandoned after many months for several reasons. An Ultimate to Universe migration is alive and running but took several times as long as "estimated". A GUI frontend addition to a UV system took a lot longer than the customer "thought it should" due to scope creep and a lack of planning and control. An Unidate to SQL migration is in production but still doesn't do all the things the Unidata system did. A Reality to Oracle migration dragged on for 5 years and then the company was bought out by a company using SAP so they switched to SAP. They are still in business so I guess that it's working for them. In another case, the programmer has built a very well organized and functional system but the PHB's are switching to something else. I don't know why but I bet it's not due to a favorable ROI. Why does MV lose out to the SAP's of the world? Marketing! Even IBM does a poor job of promoting U2 and they have the money to do so. The others in general have very little marketing money compared to Oracle and Microsoft. Other factors include too many vendors, each with a share of a rather small pie. Even when systems are brought together like Unidata and Universe or Mvbase and D3, the vendors choose to maintain separate versions. As long as there are so many versions, one of them will never have the resources to have effective marketing. Of course, there are a lot of other factors. Perhaps a bigger push into the open source space would help. I recently read that MySQL has a long history of bugs, like losing all your data, and some of them will not be fixed. Yet it remains the most popular free database. We have a better mouse trap, why doesn't the world know it? Just, my 2 cents worth. BTW, I'm looking for programming work! Universe, Unidata, jBASE, etc. Linux, Aix, Windows, Mac. Don Robinson donr_w...@yahoo.com ________________________________ From: John Hester <jhes...@momtex.com> To: u2-users@listserver.u2ug.org Sent: Friday, April 17, 2009 3:18:28 PM Subject: [U2] UV to SAP migration disaster There were a few posts back in January about Denver jewelry retailer Shane Co. and their disastrous migration from UV to SAP. Today they're starring in an eWeek slideshow about I.T. disasters: http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/IT-Management/Dirty-Dozen-Inside-12-IT-Di sasters-874085/?kc=EWKNLEDP04172009A They're in slides 7 and 8. The slideshow itself isn't good for much more than a little "gee, I'm sure glad that didn't happen to me" shadenfreude, but I thought it was interesting that a failed migration away from UV caught the attention of the mainstream I.T. press. -John ------- u2-users mailing list u2-users@listserver.u2ug.org To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/ ------- u2-users mailing list u2-users@listserver.u2ug.org To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
