BSc 3&4
Aug 2012 – Nov 2012
HURES
CASE STUDY
1. Do you think the problems faced by Hures, both past and present, are unique? Why or why not?
The problems faced by Hures company in the past are common as this was what most companies have face after the revolution from the so called GOOD OLD DAYS in which mainframes roamed the earth and life was simple. Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, industry, consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and transaction processing and bulk data processing. The term originally referred to the large cabinets that housed the central processing unit and main memory of early computers but as of today those cabinets are no longer cabinets but then powerful l high-end commercial machines which also are used in client server networking as servers and this has overshadowed most of the disadvantages of the old traditional mainframes that led to the many problems as like those faced by Hures company.
The disadvantages of the way Mainframes were used in the Good old days is that there was no flexibility as mix and matching was not accommodated but they only served so-called dumb terminals on the users’ desktops meaning you had to be wired to the mainframe to access data, also software platforms were specific and maintenance and system management were costly as every component of the system needed to be maintained. Like any other company would have done to keep up with keep up with growing business demands, Hures implemented its first information system in 1987 purchasing a mainframe computer. But then because of the revolution from the Good Old Days as explained above to the client /server they probably faces all the disadvantages pertaining to flexibility, maintenance and system management, and it was difficult for them to connect with the outside world and so they had to also change