Having spent some time with the boys at Zitel, I can shed a bit of light on the subject/. They are true propeller heads, with a great understanding of the Cobol environment and are excellent with code. However, with that bit of praise, the good news ends. They are not good at understanding what customers are all about, having been buried away for years, and have been constantly revising the code since day one. In order to run code thru their factory, it must be carefully pre-screened, at the customer site, changing the "million lines of code per hour" to a much slower pace, if all is included. The system at the factory is a bit sensative to 'things it doesn't understand' and hence will go down if it sees odd references, again sort of changing the 'lines per hour' number. As is well known, they chose the wrong horse early in the game with no windowing product. This was endemic of the inability to understand the world outside of the lab. Also, the 'factory' concept has yet to prove itself in the real world, as people are 1) nervous about letting code out 2) like to see the process so they can respond to problems (e-mail is wonderful, but standing there is faster) 3) only a true guarentee in dollars makes it worthwhile to send out [the only guarentee at the factory is that if it doesnt work when you get it back, we'll take it back and fix it].
I guess they will get some business as things get more desperate, but not going to ever be the king of the hill, oreven half way up.
AA |
