[Info-vax] Real live example...

[John Dallman]

In article <tt2hp1$155u9$2 at dont-email.me>,
clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP (Simon Clubley) wrote:

> VSI need to be cultivating a feeling of familiarity and safety 
> towards VMS in the minds of these people instead of what is the 
> current thinking in those people of VMS being a risky obsolete
> technology that is holding back the company and putting them at 
> risk.
> 
> Even IBM understands this. 

IBM have understood this since the really early days. They started
sending out their salesmen dressed like businessmen, reckoning that
businessmen buy more readily from someone who seems like them. 

> IBM have cultivated an entire environment that gives people 
> structured knowledge and training on z/OS for free, in what
> was originally known as the Master the Mainframe program.

One of the reasons that was affordable was the extremely well-developed
virtualisation capability of IBM mainframes. Master the Mainframe
students are well-isolated from each other and can't damage the
environment they're using. 

> VSI should have had similar programs for both technical and 
> management paths and they should have had them years ago. 
> _That_ is the single most important thing that VSI should 
> have been doing - to induce a culture of knowledge and
> familiarity towards VMS in the current generation of people.

If VSI wanted to set up a training environment years ago, they'd have had
to have to pay HP for copies of Integrity Virtual Machines. It's also not
a given that they had enough Itanium server capacity to do it seriously. 

However, once VMS x86 is useful as a stand-alone system, offering it on a
cloud service for this kind of training looks much more practical. 

John