z stuff

1) Is it your experience that people who fall into this camp are open to being educated on the values?

Yes, in my experience these types are open to being educated on the value. The problem is that while the may be open, they may not be motivated to do anything after listening, change causes stress after all.

2) What do you do with this person? Is there any real hope of overcoming objections here?

These types are far less likely to be moved. Some bad experience from earlier in their lives, some feeling of being ripped off, exploited or generally unloved stops them. Or perhaps fear stops them, fear of not being fashionable.

3) Listener may well agree with value proposition of platform, but not believe that solution does any more than simply run on the platform, in some dumb, unexploitive way.

This is the crux of the problem. In my youth I used to think that there was some root cause technical magic bullet of why deploying on z was better than any other platform. But there is not, the root cause of any IT decision is the dollar bill. The real value of z is that it is cheaper than other platforms for a certain size of workload. By size I mean "size now and expected growth".

And it really doesn't matter what that workload is, SOA or other. If it's cheaper to run it on z, then z is the place to run it. And by cheaper I mean looking at the total cost of ownership (h/w, s/w, people, outages), not initial cost of acquisition, compared to other platforms.

z has always suffered from the human approach to measurement of true cost, and it's not the answer to all sizes of workload.