Re: Why aren't more universities doing this?
From: JF Mezei (jfmezei.spamnot_at_teksavvy.com)
Date: 02/08/05
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Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2005 17:49:12 -0500
Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> Not exactly true. It would have to be examined like any other
> project, but I was successful in getting 4 porting projects
> approved by our faculty committee a few years ago.
At a bank, I was, for long time, prevented from buying a $6000 C
compiler. Reason being that since VMS was not strategic, no development
should be done to it, especially since the bank was spending $300,000 on
a STUDY to replace the VMS systems. When that study failed, the bank was
forced to instiutute a disaster recoivery plan for this mission critical
system (SWIFT funds transfers). For a while, the purse was easy to dip into.
However, the day SWIFT announced it was widthdrawing support for VMS,
the bank again froze all development on that system since it would have
to be replaced as soon as possible. (that ended up taking years before
the unix software had the same functionality as the old ST400).
During those years, Digital/Compaq still saw maintenance revenus, so
they may have considered that customer safe even though the decisions
had been taken to dump the VMS systems. And yes, Sun got the business.
Even though its disaster recovery scheme was nowhere as good as what I
had setup, it was good enough and besides the bank had no choice since
VMS was no longer a solution for SWIFT.
When a company decides that a system is to be disposed of eventually,
don't expect it to be easy to obtain anything to improve that system
during that period. The grunts at the low level do see these decisions
being taken, but the folks at HP/compaq/Digital don't, until it is too late.
So when someone reports here that they are not allowed to buy an extra
disk drive for a VMS system, HP employees should see this as an early
warning of an impending loss of customer and intervene to try to save
the account before the replacement system is implemented.
You can't salvage an account the day the customer doesn't renew
maintenance contract since that happens when the cutsomer already has
the replacement system in production.
The story of VMS is very similar to that of IBM. In his book "Who says
elephants can't dance", Gerstner outlines how he had to drive employees
not to accept loss of an account and fight hard to keep accounts and win
new sales, instead of just pushing papers to process orders that come
from loyal customers whom IBM never feared losing before.
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