To be or not to be?

Recently we got a letter from Timo Kotilainen, Chairman of Finnish IDMS User Association asking us for advice and guidelines and strategic directions on future data processing. The letter follows:

Date: Tue, 07 Apr 1998 08:31:36 +0300
From: Timo Kotilainen

To: idmssql@oocities.com
Subject: idms sql material

Hi,

can you advise me where to get material on idms sql, benchmark test
results, case studies, references on big volume, heavy update use sites
etc. ?

our company is creating strategies for future data processing and
database systems, and i'd like to convince my collagues that idms sql is
a real option

reagrds
timo kotilainen

IWDG Reply ( May 1998)

First of all IDMS/SQL News or IWDG can only make some suggestions. The main guidelines should come (or should have already come) from the vendor of the product. Today, at best it is not clear and at worst, that is sadly missing! Signals coming from the vendor were not clear at all. Added to the confusion is the support policy followed within CA Scandinavia, which has been badly reflected in some of the most recent events happening here.

The Product Positioning

When SQL Support was available in IDMS some time in 92-93, clients expected a "big-bang" approach of promotion from the vendor: this never happened. It is as if like the industry "yellow papers" the vendor also believed in the "death of mainframe" by March 1995! The expected end of the world never came, and to our knowledge a large number of IDMS Customers (even those who proclaimed that they would convert in a few years) are still using the product for critical OLTP applications.

SQL has been heavily used by Scandinavian Clients. But as we pointed out several times in these columns, the help from CA in Scandinavia was hopeless. Even when IDMS technicians in CA put efforts to help the clients they were hampered by artificial roadblocks set up by the so called management hierarchy in Scandinavia. Last December, CA Scandinavia tried to stop the participation of a CA technician in the Finnish meeting! Again in February when one Finnish Client had serious database crisis, this technician had strict guidelines not to intervene! A Danish Client's request for urgent help on VM/IDMS was also turned down by CA Denmark! Last but not least, most recently a Swedish client going in production with strategic application in 12.0, got "bla bla" from CA, instead of help!

Even though the first major commerial SQL application with 117 tables was put in production in 1994 in Bergen, no IDMS Technician from CA Scandinavia (N,DK,FIN,S) has ever been seen in an IMC meeting for the last 7 years! Recently many SQL problems reported by a Finnish Client are still unsolved. Marketing people from the vendor did a Gateway (Ingres Gateway to IDMS) project in Oslo (no IDMS technician was involved from the vendor!) and it ended in total disaster wasting millions of Kroner! Again yet another client in Oslo is making a large application with tables of 50 to 100 million records. Though the client got some guidelines from IDMS Level II and local Level I, as a vendor the involvment from local CA was marketing lectures! Another client in Oslo is on the verge of making a strategic decision on huge SQL application! Some events have cast a shadow on many people's mind with respect to what to expect from the vendor!

The latest news we have is that a well-known IDMS Technician who has done tremendous work on IDMS in general and SQL in particular, has been unceremoniously kicked out (or locked out) of CA Norway recently. CA Scandinavia with the most active SQL client base in the world is left with just 0.5 person supporting IDMS Clients in 4 countries! Remember that the number of actual sites is not very much different from 1989, size of databases have in fact doubled in many places, even the number of external consultants working on IDMS in Scandinavia today is higher than that of 1989. But the involvment from the vendor has been reduced to a fraction of what it was in 1989!

Nordic (Support) Joke!

Until May 1993 the following technicians were supporting IDMS in Scandinavia.


IDMS Technicians in CA Scandinavia:

Gopi Nathan (N)
Oddbjoern Brække (N) (left a little earlier)
Markku Koivumåkki (FIN)
Heikki Karonen (FIN)
Pekka Selenius (FIN)
Nils Jessen (DK)
Jørgen Hansen (DK)
Ian Hill(DK)
Erik Schmidt (S)
Botvid Sundberg(S)

Besides, well-known IDMS veterans Thomas Frisendal (DK) and Seppo Vourinen(FIN) and database specialist Jarmo Nordlund (FIN) were with CA, in repsective countries. Today, as per CA, there is just one left - Ian Hill - supporting the same client base, running much bigger volume and making strategic SQL applications! When CA reduced manpower on Mainframe in 93, the focus was on PC products. But of all the PC products from CA, only Superproject made an impact, all the rest failed!

Status Meetings

1993 May was a turning point in CA Scandinavia. Until then, an IDMS technician used to partcipate in status meetings with the clients. In Norway, since May 1993, no IDMS technician from CA ever took part in a status meeting at any of the strategic clients - Statoil, Hydro, Televerket, BBS, SDS etc. Sales and so-called pre-sales blinked on questions from IDMS DBAs at the clients on important technical directions! Once a client who tried to move from VM/CMS to MVS, and expecting serious guidelines on the move got a pre-sales demo of Realizer accessing PC from CA Norway(!) Technicians and Consultants who eagerly gathered for the meeting left the room in utter disgust!

What Now?

Today, with 0.5 of a person (the other half of Ian Hill is supporting various products including Ingres, UFO, Easytrive etc as seen from the Support calls from various clients) we cannot say that IDMS is properly supported in Scandinavia. Of course, unless you apply some Hoemeopathy principle! (In certain cases of Homeopathy, the effect of the medicine increases, when the quantity of the medicine is decreased!).

All are Equal - but some are less equal?

Whenever a crisis arose, well known clients like British Telecom and Mercedez Benz got onsite visits from Level II in Westwood on many many occasions. At the same time, because of the "involvement of Nordic Managers", no such visits were made to Scandinavian Clients, eventhough most of them were more advanced in the usage of the product (SQL, ODBC, LU6.2, WWW ). The only exception to this rule was visit to Bergen by John Siraco in 93 (mostly the initiative for this came from the client and Westwood!).

During the most recent database crisis in Finland (details at Broken Chains, there were about 20+ people involved in the "ping pong" game of solving the problem. But the much expected visit from Level II never took place. (Just imagine, if there had been a similar crisis elsewhere in Europe!) There were cases where clients were willing to pay for a level II technician, got OK from level II managers but got veto from Denmark!

"Small Countries Syndrome"

There has been also a wrong notion, that Scandinavian clients and countries are small! Well, whatever the geographical or population perspective is, in dataprocessing this is not true at all. We have clients whose IDMS database is as large as > 270 Giga! Is that not large enough? We have SQL clients whose tables are as large as 70 million rows! We have network db record which is as large as 300 million occurrences! These are all small according to the armchair bosses of support in CA Scandinavia!

In this situation, IWDG makes no comments or suggestions. We are just watching the drama as it is unfolding! As said earlier, we can only watch helplessly when "the fence itself starts eating the crops!"

On the other hand, the product is always bigger than the company or the people! A great product like IDMS is like a river! As Lord Tennyson put it

Men may come and men may go
But I go on forever!

We wish you good luck.
- IDMS/SQL News

We thank all readers for their interest and appreciation. Comments, suggestions and related articles are welcome.
email idmssql@oocities.com

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