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I <br />proposed by each. Infocel's approach is to provide on -site <br />help for County staff to do the conversion and verification, <br />While CRC's approach is to do the conversion at their lab in <br />Ohio and then, with their help, have the County Data <br />Processing staff verify the results. I think this is the <br />better option as CRC does the actual conversion and we do the <br />verification, which we are going to do under either option. <br />Cost differences are also significant with Infocel being over <br />$50,000 higher. Bids were received July 2, 1991, and were <br />valid for a 90 day period. CRC has agreed to extend its bid <br />another 60 days, while Infocel indicated there would be a <br />price increase after the 90 day period. The original bids, <br />including trade -in credit for the County's two existing <br />platforms, were $275,088 from CRC, and $327,277 from Infocel, <br />with Infocel's total increasing approximately $40,000 after <br />November 1, 1991. <br />At this point, I would lean towards recommending the CRC <br />proposal. In addition to the strong points I have just <br />mentioned and those that I address further on, the CRC option <br />looks even better because of the potential for covering the <br />lion's share of lease purchase payments from money not spent <br />on MDCSC and Prime maintenance contracts. Hardware and <br />software maintenance for this proposal would be less than <br />$30,000 per year, after a first year maintenance cost of <br />about $20,000. <br />A recent trend has been increased reliability of computer <br />equipment. There are fewer mechanical components to <br />break. Mean time to failure has increased dramatically. <br />Equipment has more built -in diagnostic software that <br />identifies potential failures before they become major.. This <br />trend is reflected in the substantially lower maintenance <br />costs of newer versus older equipment. <br />4. Major Benefits <br />With the CRC proposal, the County would be moving to a new <br />state of the art platform, an RS6000. This series was <br />released by IBM in 1990 with the Model 550, the one proposed <br />here, just released in May of 1991. It is a "UNIX" based <br />platform using IBM's "AIX" operating system and VMart <br />"UNIVERSE" data base management system. "UNIX" was designed <br />from the very beginning with multiuser and multitasking as a <br />primary goal. "UNIVERSE" was designed to run "PICK" on many <br />different systems and is currently available on over seventy <br />platforms. It is aimed at the old Microdata or MDCSC client <br />base so it runs our existing applications with very few. <br />5 <br />