A software developer once said, "If you have PCs, you have a LAN." If you have PCs, you also probably have some PC experts on staff, so why not tap into that expertise by establishing a DOS-based PC LAN as an enterprisewide application platform?

The first three rules in determining business solutions provide the reason why not: applications, applications, and applications. when my company, Green Thumb, was looking to modernize its financial applications, including general ledger, accounts payable and its 18,000-check payroll, we looked at applications on PC LANs and on the AS/400. Guess what? LAN financials didn't stack up. Here's why:

• We could not find another LAN user in the country who produced more than 1,000 checks a month.
• Even though LAN vendors argued that, on a LAN, improved performance could be obtained by adding more file servers and more workstations, they offered no experience, and no real solutions to assure that critical applications could be run on separate CPU's while maintaining data integrity.
• The best LAN-based payroll applications did not integrate tax tables into their applications. Imagine processing payroll for nearly 50 states having to manually maintain every local tax in the country.
• PC-based accounting systems did not offer normalized data structures (using the relational database model). Whereas our current AS/400 chart of account contains 150 accounts, the LAN-based packages would have required more than 100,000 entries!
• LAN-based payroll packages did not offer an integrated human resources package.
• Most LAN-based packages did not provide source code, and those that did, did not provide support by the programmers who wrote the code.

One cannot compare the plethora of functions offered by AS/400 applications to the functions available on a LAN. The examples above emphasize payroll, because payroll is Green Thumb's most critical application. Similar observations have been made about other enterprisewide LAN-based applications.

Although hardware technology quickly transfers from one hardware platform to the next, how many of us would trust a DOS-based LAN with 20 gigabytes of disk? How many of us have seen a PC LAN printer that can print 2,200 lines per minute? How many DOS-based machines can accommodate a million database accesses per day? Maybe someday, software developers will invest the research and development for a full-blown LAN-based enterprisewide application. But if it's out there today, I still haven't seen it.

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