Re: Tiger Stock

Kevin Powick wrote:

Tony Gravagno wrote:
my bet has to go to InterSystems for Caché and Northgate for Reality.

Isn't that the nobody ever gets fired for going with IBM mentality?
Nothing is a sure bet and I have no issue putting clients on QM.
If they ever went under (a bus?), I would just port them to something
else.

Responding to both Jeff and Kevin on two points:

1) On the concept of "going anywhere": Northgate is as dedicated to
Reality as Temenos is to jBASE. They eat their own dog food and make
a lot of money selling applications based on their own platform.
They're a $2+ billion company. I don't think they're going away from
their investment. If they do they'll sell it to someone who can
afford it, and a successor with equally deep pockets would probably be
inclined to take good care of such costly assets. InterSystems has
also built MV into Caché as a core component, and as a privately held
company, always in the black, they're not selling their business to
anyone. Anyone who is concerned about this simply doesn't have enough
information about corporate InterSystems yet. MVBASIC is now as
native a language to Caché as any of their other languages. They
don't have a separate MV port that they can sell to someone else if
they get bored.

2) In the hypothetical wake of a proverbial bus, is "just porting
users to another platform" really all that easy? If it were, would so
many people still be concerned about migrations and/or supporting
multiple platforms? The point here is that it is indeed a major deal
to migrate yourself, your development staff, your products, and your
customers. Most people only want to do this once, if ever. Most
people who are motivated to migrate, but have not, are not going to
look on such a migration as "if it doesn't work out we'll just do it
again". Pick guys are generally reluctant to change, so when they do
they want to do it only once for the foreseeable future.

Again, let's assume all of these products are technically equivalent
as far as their R83 compatibility. The next technical thing to look
for might be connectivity. That would include .NET, Java, PHP, COM,
SQL (ODBC/ADO, etc). QM supports some of these and I'd argue that we
could put almost everything else we want through QMClient. But the
larger players support more interfaces, more natively. As a guy who
makes a living selling add-on tools and connectivity products, I'm
here to tell you that most sites want everything built in. (I would
choke if I got arguments about that from this crowd.) Well, Caché and
Reality do have all of those interfaces already built-in and supported
by the DBMS vendor, just the way you like it. QM is fine in what it
does, but it certainly does not support all of the interfaces that the
other guys do. With some of these points in mind, my issue is not
with QM quality, its with the lack of infrastructure required to
create and maintain an enterprise-scale DBMS platform.

Coming back to a point in the last paragraph: Lack of support for SQL
has been a major issue for QM. What are the larger sites talking
about all the time in the U2 forum? They're asking abou SQL to/from
Universe and Unidata. Both Caché and Reality not only support SQL,
but can function entirely as SQL/Relational DBMS engines, while still
storing the data in MV structures with MV BASIC business rules. This
is the holy grail of our market today and we essentially have two
companies offering high quality solutions. Sure, we can get by doing
our MV thing like we always have ("death to SQL!"), but to get those
next sales we need to break out of these comfort zones where SQL is
what "they" do and what "we" don't want or need to do.

It doesn't matter if the topic is SQL or Java or some other tech
point. If the goal is really to sell more systems, and I'm just
talking to you people who still want to sell new systems out there,
then we need to be able to check those checkboxes where people want to
do things like make SQL queries against their database. If you're not
interested in selling more than the small number of systems you
personally can support, and your end-users are never going to ask for
anything other than what you provide them, then I think QM would be a
fine solution - and both InterSystems and Northgate would probably
have no problem losing that kind of business.

Kevin, regarding not getting fired for buying IBM, there are MANY
reasons for looking at Caché and Reality outside of the large
companies. Let's not take a single statement and make it sound like
it's the only argument.

For both companies:
- Yes they're very large.
- They're very well funded.
- They both have large staff allocated for development and support.
- Both companies are aggressive in pre-sales and can cut the porting
and learning cycles significantly compared to other MV offerings.
- They're both dedicated to the products that we're interested in.
- The products are very full featured and very high quality.

None of that implies that other MV companies are small, disinterested,
unfunded, and/or have products that are incapable or of lesser
quality. All factors need to be considered, and when you want ALL
checkboxes checked rather than just some of them, the options narrow
down quickly to these companies and their offerings.

I've looked at both products and I'm VERY impressed with them both. I
dare say most people who have something against either product have
probably not spent any time with either, and anyone who is unsure
about either company probably isn't familiar with either company.

When I see people promoting QM in favor of the others I see some
curious math: Take any other MV company and related software, uncheck
a couple of those selling points, then add a bit of passion, and
suddenly we have a new winner. I want to see Martin win a major part
of this game as much as anyone. He deserves it. He's earned our
respect and loyalty. If my clients walk into the office of new
prospects, large companies that will buy ERP solutions, I don't think
they have a chance if they put Ladybridge or QM on the table. All of
the passion added into the equation for our own purposes isn't going
to impress prospects looking for solid solutions and solid business
relationships. But for all of the reasons why people like IBM, I do
think someone selling applications has a great chance of selling Caché
or Reality - even if they only need to get through the checkbox
process and move on to what really matters, which is application
functionality. All the passion in the world isn't going to buy one of
those larger sites for us.

We need to create long-term partnerships with companies who are
capable of supporting us and the people who trust us. Many of us
thought that was going to be Pick Systems, and for some it still is
through Raining Data and Tiger Logic. People moving from the PS/RD/TL
debacle need to look toward increasing stability, especially when
they're asking existing clients to move forward with them. As much as
we like QM, I think it's a bit much to ask existing sites to make that
almost sideways jump. Most people don't leave D3 because it's bad
software, they leave PS/RD/TL because it's a badly managed company.
Arguably D3 and QM are equivalently capable of supporting any business
application. So if we take that off the table and compare companies,
how much are we buying in a sideways migration like this? If you're
going to move sideways in this industry, you might as well take a look
at all of the other benefits offered by other companies that offer a
similar sideways move. Once you do, there are clear distinctions
amongst the competitors.

On the flipside of all of this, I honestly do see minor issues with
both InterSystems and Northgate, and with both products. None of
these points are show-stoppers but I believe these issues have
contributed to the lack of understanding, acceptance, and sales that
they've both experienced in the time they've been trying to approach
this market. Unless they work out these kinks, people will continue
to pit them against Ladybridge. The David and Goliath analogy is
unavoidable here, I think that's part of what drives people to embrace
QM compared to the others.

In any case, I'm of the opinion that any company that is competitively
comparing InterSystems vs Northgate is much further along than those
still looking at the alternatives. It's like deciding which mountain
to scale, compared to deciding which hill to hike.

And for anyone who is concerned about paying "mountainous" prices,
here again I think anyone who still worries about such things simply
hasn't asked about exactly what the pricing of the competitors is.

You don't have to take it from me - just do some research and come to
your own conclusions. I didn't call my company Nebula "Research" and
Development for nothing. ;)

Tony Gravagno
Nebula Research and Development
TG@ remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com
Nebula R&D sells mv.NET and other Pick/MultiValue products worldwide,
and provides related development and training services
.

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