On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 10:28 AM, Farley, Peter x23353 < [email protected]> wrote:
> John, > > I well remember my own sticker shock when I first spoke with MicroFocus > sales several decades ago. As a consultant at that time, I wanted to > license a single copy of their COBOL and CICS environments for > non-production development use on my personal workstation. IIRC they were > quite firm about the $8,000 purchase price per workstation and 15% annual > maintenance fee (also per workstation) regardless of how or where it would > be used. No exceptions. > I was told the cost was going to be $300,000+ . I don't know if that was "per seat" or total. > > z390 is a wonderful and creative tool for a hobbyist to experiment with. > As far as I know it is definitely NOT ready to support anything like > production volume levels or real CICS and z/OS reliability levels. IMHO, > not a good move for a business that wants to stay in business. > My boss's argument. His boss agrees completely. > > You should also tell that programmer and your management that the > originator and maintainer of z390 is currently looking for a new maintainer > to take over from him, and I do not know if that search has been successful > yet. > > GNU OpenCOBOL isn't a solution either as there is no CICS support there. > > There are other (expensive) options out there from "legacy conversion" > companies who will take your IBM mainframe applications and move them to > distributed systems for you. Like any other outsourced conversion, you get > what you pay for. Caveat Emptor. > Yes, as I just posted these costs (I was told >$300,000) are why we have, just today, decided to decommission the z 4Q2016 instead of 2Q2016, praise be to the Actuaries (the drivers of this entire COBOL necessity project). Turns out that the "project manger" (recently transferred to an allied company) was quoting the mainframe costs FROM 2 YEARS AGO instead of the current, greatly reduced, costs, apparently to justify this "conversion". > > TANSTAAFL -- I giggle with you! Occasionally karma kicks butt where it is > really needed. > > Peter > -- Schrodinger's backup: The condition of any backup is unknown until a restore is attempted. Yoda of Borg, we are. Futile, resistance is, yes. Assimilated, you will be. He's about as useful as a wax frying pan. 10 to the 12th power microphones = 1 Megaphone Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
