Blog
You and i

« Modernizing –TMW and Profound Logic | Main | Modernizing–Bellamy & looksoftware »

07/22/2014

Comments

UPDATE: 07-23-2014 - With another new sale Mincron has signed up 7 new IBM i customers in the past 13 months.

Fantastic !!! However there is another question to ask : each time Mincron find a new customer, it has to pay royalties to Lansa, which proves IBM i needs to be modernized to be modern. This platform has huge potentialities and is reliable like a mainframe, build for the cloud, but still has a sustainability problem.

Nice! However... ;)
I understand the need to quickly develop mobile apps, using LongRange for example. But, for a software company to modernize, IMO, it's imperative to acquire modern skills instead of just relying on in-house RPG skills. The resulting mobile app works, yes. But, the functionality is restricted to whatever Lansa cooks up. Also, as a software company you need to know how the app works, having knowlegde not only of RPG and IBM i, but also the mobile platform and every layer inbetween. If a customer has a question about iOS for example, if something is possible, you can't say "well, i don't know i only know about green screen i check if Lansa supports this". Or if there is a problem (i.e. when it suddenly does not work) you as the company providing the solution must be able to assess the problem. It's a common problem when using "4GL" tools. It works, but we really know why and how. They are good for quick-and-dirty apps (that is built using a quick-and-dirty method) which do not have a long lifespan. But if you plan to invest for the coming 10 or 20 years in modern tech (web/mobile etc), you really ought to have real knowledge about it, and skills. Instead of relying on a black box with traditional RPG in and an iOS app out. And, it's easy to acquire these skills. Young man and woman (outside the IBM i community) enough that have these skills, and who want to apply these skills to a platform like IBM i, with it's robustness and predictability, instead of those flaky (i.e. not suited for business) platforms (web/windows).

I quite agree with John Erps

The comments to this entry are closed.