COMPUTERWORLD AS/400 SURVEY RESULTS

NEWS/400 Subject: NEWSWire/400-04.30.97
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 1997 13:59:04 -0600
From: "NEWSWire/400"


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Issue 33 April 30, 1997 SURVEY: AS/400 USERS ON "CLOUD NINE" AS/400 customers participating in a recent Computerworld customer satisfaction survey gave their system tremendous marks for quality and service and support -- boosting IBM to a close second in the overall ratings for distributed systems hardware. The survey results, appearing in the weekly publication's April 21 issue, show HP topping IBM by a slim margin of 3.91 to 3.86 (with 5 representing completely satisfied). The RS/6000 negated some of the AS/400's positive aura, dragging down IBM's rating with some of the lowest satisfaction marks in the survey. "IBM may have ranked first in this section of the survey -- by a sizable margin -- if the only IBM users surveyed were AS/400 customers," the article says. "Those users gave some of the highest grades in the entire survey."

The AS/400's highest rankings were for product quality and service and support, with the system also receiving high marks for database management. Its lowest grades came for price range, but it bounced back with good value ratings. In the database management systems (DBMS) category, OS/400 users gave their integrated database a top score of 4.17, leading all products in the areas of quality, service and support, cost of ownership, and comfort with vendor. IBM (general) came in second with a score of 4.03. OS/400 beat all the open systems DBMS, with Windows NT SQL Server topping the open systems group. "As our giant customer satisfaction survey demonstrates, the happiest users tend to be the ones with the least choice," wrote Editor Paul Gillin in his Page 2 column. "AS/400 users are on cloud nine. Users rave about the AS/400's quality, service and support. And guess what? The AS/400 is the most proprietary system on the planet."

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