[Info-vax] Moving away from OpenVMS

[JF Mezei]

John Wallace wrote:

> IT: "if it's not Wintel, we want it out, because it's not strategic"
> Business: "based on our product evaluations, product XYZ continues to
> be the best value for the business, and indeed the only product that
> does [PQR] but it does not run on Window boxes"

I have seen this at a bank. Dept chose a VAX solution for SWIFT funds
transfers because of the functionality not available on other platforms
(mostly at application level).

Palmer told SWIFT to move from VMS, and SWIFT announced to their
customers to start to plan to move away from VMS.

At the bank, the IT folks were happy to finaly get rid of the VAX. But
it took years before they were able to find/build a solution with equal
capabilities. (with acceptable compromises for disaster tolerance).

The thing is that once you know that you will have to move from one
platform, you need to start planning this years ahead because you need
to make a considerate choice of platform, find middleware that will
approximate your currrent functionlity etc etc.

You don't just hire some geeks and tell them to port this to Linux.