System i Addict

As some of you may know there are three big players in HA and Fail Over Software. Lakeview, Vision, and iTera (oh Data Mirror too but I know very little about them and their solution.) and in the past few weeks Vision and iTera were quietly became one company.

I have been a VISION customer, I have been a Lakeview customer, and I am an iTera customer now. I could give you reasons to love and not love each of them, but the ideas that VISION and iTera are now apart of the same company scares the you know what out of me. I think iTera has a good product. it’s light and runs well, I think Vision has a very large and bloated product and they think the world of it hence the large price tag.

So you take the worst of both world. Vision starts to think the world of iTera’s nice little product and boom, Nice product becomes really expensive over night. This combined with iTera being a little lite in other spots too and Vision being so big they can’t manage certain parts of their business very well and you have a perfect storm for Lakeview to pick up a good many frustrated customers. Who knows maybe even me?

I am going to watch this all unfold and if either side starts to show signs of the perfect storm, you can bet I am on the phone with my Lakeview rep.

Link to System iNetwork Article here.

FOLLOW UP: I just got back from Salt Lake City spending a wonderful week with the iTera team in training. They have a reallly decent product. I think they have some infastructure issues, but they admit to that openly, but Dan the former owner is a wonderful person, they all seem very up about the new company and the inside scoop is the new Vision product is going to be th iTera Echo2 product. So I would guess that the Vision OMS/400 and ODS/400 is dead, thank god, and the new offering is the Echo2 product which I might add is very solid. It has some issues with it but most of them are annoying little consistency issues not big life fail over issues. They will get that fixed soon enought I woudl think.

Some of the issues:

1. Consistancy of the options and F-keys with the IBm standard. IBM uses the “4″ to delete and object and iTera uses it to add or edit. Come on guys. “4″ is to delete and that is all. f12 is to cancel. f3 is to exit and so on. Fix the bloody screens so that it is consistant with the iSeries base OS.

2. Make all the options and f-keys the same on every screen.

3. Put the menu option like 1.1 on the top of the screen when you are in it so that you knwo what option you are in please.

4. I find it odd that Rick the trainer had loads, and I mean loads of great ideas to make the product better and no one at the company has listened to him. It really did make me think twice about a company that would not listen to the ideas of one of it’s own employees in order to improve the product. In my opinion Rick has really smart and insightful ideas about how to make the product more usable and less clunky and yet none of them he said were on the slate to get put in the product. If you not going to listen to one of your own fine and talented employees then why would you ever listen to me the customer?

That is all. iTera can call me if they want me to go over any more if this and thanks again for the great week in Salt Lake City, it’s a very beautiful city and the lights downtown were incredible.