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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (28626)	7/24/2000 10:43:24 AM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

I told you not to ask me that question! The short answer is--The same way you do. <g> My impression is that it used primarily by the high end of the mid-tier market and much larger companies, but I'm not sure how I got that impression. Seriously, I don't have a hard, firm definition of "mid-tier" or mid-sized companies. But, from gut instinct, I would place them in the general category of companies between $10M and $100M in revenues with employees from 1000 to 10,000. Conservative, low-tech companies in the $500M revene range may also fit here, especially if they have had slow growth prospects for a while. Keep in mind, though, that the System 36 and System 38 of the 1980's were predecessors to the AS400. Those systems had two target market segments: mid-sized businesses needing centralized computing facilities for accounting solutions (payroll, inventory, A/P, A/R) and large companies needing systems distributed in regional offices. (This was all before the WINTEL revolution "tornadoed" and in the midst of the minicomputer revolution before personal computing involved into file server-centric LANs.) S/36 and S/38 were fabulously successful at the time. Thus we will still find AS400s in large corporations as well.