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Strategies & Market Trends : The Rational Analyst -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: HeyRainier who wrote (391)	2/28/1998 8:20:00 AM
From: ftth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1720

This is a great reference "link to links" for many computer and network topics. Here's their links to AS/400: pcwebopedia.com dh

To: HeyRainier who wrote (391)	3/1/1998 1:02:00 AM
From: Scott H. Davis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1720

[PERLF & AS/400 platform] Rainier & All: Here's my AS/400 take after a 20 minute review of the link supplied info & my industry experience. The IBM AS/400 platform is not dead & will continue to be enhanced. IBM has migrated most of their non-mainframe platform to the RISC architecture due to it's being more industry standard & has better performance that their previous offerings, thus enabling them to leverage development across platforms & performance levels (their AIX based offerings are also RISC, Power PC based) That being said, they are still very propriatary, which has been the IBM corporate approach. (The PC was a refreshing break, then they mucked up their lead with the MicroChannel fiasco) For example, their Database is DB2, and old, reworked IMB System 370 propriatary database language, rather than Oracle, Sybase. Informix ofr MSFT SQL. While IBM claims it's better (surprise?) the fact is the only people who use DB2 are IBM shops, or sites purchasing systems based on the system being the platform of the main applications(s) they run. So they have their market niche, will continue to develop to preserve it, but probably won't be able to expand much outside it. Bottom line is most small to medium size IS departments have people familiar with one or two of Novell, UNIX (or varients such as SCO or AIX), or Win NT, and not OS/400. So in summary, PERLF's AS/400 revenue stream is not going to die anytime soon. If they can offer suprerior products with superior support, maybe they can pick up a little market share. This segment of PERLF's business provides stability & a good cash flow. Now that the major part of their RAS R&D is over, the cash flow will be seen in the bottom line to a greater extent. But it's unlikely to be a high growth line. Our main Hospital Information System runs on a large AS/400 with a lot of additional storage. We've added a couple additional applications that run on the AS/400 since it was the least expensive way to add the applications. But in the last 2 years, we have not added any new AS/400 based applications, and none of the systems we are looking at for the next two years are either. So I'm glad they saw the limited growth & invested in RAS. Will probably be a good move. BTW, noticed a (relatively) big price & volume spike Friday - next week may be interesting. Scott