Evaluating tools
May 11th, 2010 | Published in Uncategorized | 2 Comments
One of the things that becomes clear if you look at the Mainframe Migration Assessment report is that Software AG license fees form a major part of the University’s administrative computing costs. We need to either make sure we’re getting our money’s worth, or find less expensive/more effective tools.
I’ve felt for some time that Natural is not adequate for what we need to do. Twenty years ago it provided more than enough power, but no longer.
Natural and Problem Domains
Also, several things Software AG has done have convinced me that they no longer see Adabas and Natural as a source of future growth. We really need to explore new tools and expand our tool set. The PyPE project is a step in the right direction, but if we’re going to continue to write our own applications we need to do more.
(This is a long enough blog for now, but once we do develop more tools the question of migrating our applications to them arises. All I’ll say for now is that I don’t see the Mainframe Migration Assessment telling us much of value about that.)
May 11th, 2010 at 9:08 am (#)
[…] has another piece up, about evaluating tools… I started to write this in a comment but thought it was too long, so I will put it […]
May 11th, 2010 at 3:56 pm (#)
One thing worht noting is, that SAG has a strategy for a future without Natural and Adabas, and we don’t. They don’t talk about it that way, but they have become steadily less dependent on that revenue for several years now, and have a clearly defined (and already in progress) strategy for how to wean themselves off it. They may not have in mind any particular date for pulling the plug, if ever, but they do have a strategy and it’s progressing reasonably well.
We may be heavily invested in Natural and Adabas, but not more heavily than SAG; we should strive to do at least as well as they in learning to live without it.