Gartner prescribes ISV treatment plan
Cath Everett at the Enterprise Systems Conference in Chicago.
Corporates should use the skills of independent software vendors (ISVs) when considering which system to purchase, although this factor is often overlooked by technical evaluation committees.
This was the view of Paul McGuckin, vice president and research director of Gartner Group, speaking at the analyst company's fifth annual Enterprise Systems conference in Chicago last week.
McGuckin pointed out that top ISVs receive upgrades and releases in 30 to 60 days, experience a fast turnaround in bug fixes and have technical support staff who actually know what users are talking about. As a result, he advised users to ask their independent vendors for a revenue breakdown based on platform under non-disclosure - because software vendors do not want to be blamed for users' hardware decisions - and to look for players with double digit market share.
McGuckin said 23 per cent of SAP installations were on Hewlett Packard 9000 machines last year, 15 per cent on IBM's RS/6000 and another 15 per cent on Compaq Proliants.
But, he added, corporates should also bear in mind that Windows NT has received the most enthusiastic welcome from ISVs in the history of operating systems and many vendors such as SAP were definitely pushing users that way.
The second criterion when choosing a system is performance and scalability, McGuckin said. This becomes an issue when a system supports more than five users, and is especially relevant when implementing an enterprise resource planning application, which can support only one database server.
McGuckin estimated that currently, NT supports 600 concurrent users, Unix 3,000 and OS/390, the IBM mainframe, 4,500. The figures are expected to increase to 1,000, 4,500 and 7,500 respectively by the millennium and 3,000, 9,000 and 11,500 respectively by 2003.
However, McGuckin warned that to be in 'the comfort zone,' users should allow themselves some headroom for the future and also implement only three-quarters of the number of users given in each instance. If they chose to support more than 10 per cent of that figure, they were moving into dangerous and unchartered waters, he warned.
Next on the list is high availability, although the requirement for this depends on the application, McGuckin said. Here, MVS was far and away the leader, especially if parallel Sysplex clustering were implemented, while Unix and NT were far behind.
Other factors that should be considered are the scope and quality of service offered by vendors, said McGuckin. Users should check recent local references because service levels fluctuate from region to region.
Total cost of ownership should also be accounted for, he said, even though the total cost of support was often difficult to quantify. Users should always check the life span of any given system because it was not a good idea to buy the last model in an abandoned line.
In-house skills should also be evaluated because platform switching costs money. Customers would do well to look at how much integration work a given box might need to be implemented into the enterprise. While this is relatively easy with the AS/400, Unix and NT require users to be their 'own systems integrators', he said.
Last was internal politics. McGuckin concluded that corporates should always establish the inclinations and prejudices of the organisation, especially the chief executive, because there is no point in undertaking expensive evaluations to have them vetoed by the boss.