Susan countered this by stating that the tolerance for outages are decreasing. Susan also pointed out that IBM's Netfinity servers are an improvement over a standard NT server. We shall see. Personally, I can tell you what that does, since I was a student that HAD access to an IBM computer in high school. That experience had a long term impact on my purchasing habits as I bought some of the first IBM PCs and even this article is being written on an IBM Thinkpad.
First experiences are an unbelievable driving force over a lifetime of purchasing decisions.
From what everyone said, it seemed that IBM needs to come up with a development tool that has the pizzazz of Delphi when Philippe Kahn first showed it. Susan's recommendation for people doing Data Warehousing was to perform this function on the same machine that currently holds the data. She again alluded that IBM is going to be creating a dynamic marketing image. This panel discussion was an engaging 80 minutes and was one of the liveliest I have been to in a long time. All rights reserved.