Prompted by an assumption that HP 3000 customers are unhappy, IBM's AS/400 manager mailed them several thousand copies of a letter offering the AS/400 as a 3000 alternative.
IBM's marketing effort was sparked by a Computerworld article on the Proposition 3000 discussions at this year's IPROF programmer's forum. The letter included a reprint of the Computerworld article, saying that "the tone suggests that many [3000] owners are uncomfortable with Hewlett Packard's focus on the HP 9000."
While the ploy is targeted at the entire 3000 installed base, IBM technology executive Tony Madden said he didn't expect much response from sites running in-house software. Madden was hopeful of getting interest from companies looking for applications they couldn't find on HP 3000s.
"We don't foresee a lot of customer application conversions," Madden said. "We're expecting the ones that would move would probably do so because they find some application on the AS/400 that appeals to them."
Madden offered references to back up his expectations -- but all but one had switched to the AS/400 more than two years ago. No customer had made the decision to switch as a result of the marketing letter. IBM has offered a discount of about 10 percent on AS/400 hardware and financial help to pay for the data conversion and training.
Customers who made the conversion did so by leaving behind all their IMAGE data. Penny Walker, the MIS manager for Pacific Steel Casting of Oakland, Calif. said she "loved the HP 3000. It was a great machine. We would have stayed with it, if we'd only been able to find the software we needed."
Her company, a job-shop foundry that casts items such as truck parts, searched for a foundry management application when the two-person MIS shop decided to stop maintaining its custom software. The off-the-shelf software supplier put the company together with IBM. About four months later Walker was expecting delivery of AS/400 equipment.
Pacific Steel had been using an HP 3000 application since 1984, but didn't want to continue maintaining the source code for which it had acquired the rights. The company is also leaving behind 12 years of data as part of the conversion, for which they required IBM's assistance.
Another IBM reference site contacted had converted three years ago when its parent company divested the firm, which at that time lost access to the HP 3000 resources.
Cathy Fitzgerald, the new marketing manager of the HP 3000 division, said that IBM appeared to be making an opportunistic pitch to HP 3000 customers. While IBM sees a link between declining investment in HP-UX and the AS/400, HP does not.
"The AS/400 is having a moment in time," she said, "where they have a very large installed base, so people who have applications would consider writing to that platform. This program is a little bit of a tempest in a teapot. We're really focused on what the 3000 customers need, and their dissatisfaction with the 9000 is almost a little irrelevant."
Fitzgerald said HP is responding to the letter "by addressing it on an individual basis with customers." HP doesn't plan to draft a letter in reply, she said, "since that would call even more attention to it. We think it would be much better to contact them because we care about them as customers, rather than because they've been exposed to an IBM campaign."
HP 3000 sites which had been exposured to the letter or AS/400 conversions generally dismissed it as marketing promises. Joe Geiser, CIO of Insurance Data Processing, said his company had attempted a conversion a few years ago and found IBM's AS/400 promises fell far short of reality.
"IBM came in with many promises," he said, "like, 'we have filters for your COBOL, we can translate your VPlus, we'll write filters for your Transact, and TurboIMAGE -- no problem. All of this was bull. To migrate a 3000 application to an AS/400 takes quite a bit of work."
IBM has lined up three independent consultants to assist in migrations, including one company whose lead programmer worked on AS/400 products at Cognos Corp. before founding Astech Solutions. But Geiser said his experience showed the differences in systems were too profound to justify a switch.
"You have to dump TurboIMAGE for the OS/400 database, you have to dump VPLUS for SDA," Geiser said. "And in your programs? Every IMAGE and VPlus intrinsic needs to be rewritten, or a library put together to intercept and translate, which slows things down. If you have Transact or Rapid, it's a rewrite. The lesson? Don't fall for the filter story."
Phil Rupp, MIS manager for the City of Santa Cruz, received the letter but said it wouldn't change any plans at his site. The city runs some batch programs on its 3000 in RPG, long an AS/400 stronghold, as well as PowerHouse applications written in-house. After getting the IBM letter, Rupp said more 3000 support was in his plans.
"We here at the City of Santa Cruz love the HP 3000, and have no plans to switch to another platform," Rupp said. "In fact, we are moving our old model 935 to an offsite location as a hot site and installing a new model 959 this fall."
IBM's only advantage in its offer appears to be the size of the AS/400 market. With more than 350,000 systems installed and 8,000 business partners, IBM says it's more likely to have the off-the-shelf software that's needed.
"Most of the people who are going to make a change are going to be influenced by an application decision," IBM's Madden said.
More customers are looking for off-the-shelf applications, an HP spokesperson reported, but that doesn't always mean they're more likely to find what they need on the AS/400.
"I can't imagine a campaign where we're going to attract a foundry application to the 3000," Fitzgerald said. "Those are the kind of customers who evolve on a regular basis. We have that case in reverse, where the application the customer is looking for is direct mail and direct marketing applications -- and the application that works well for a a lot of customers is exclusively on the HP 3000."
If IBM wanted to choose a time when HP 3000 customers were discontent, they couldn't have picked more poorly. The HP 3000 has often scored well in the independent user satisfaction surveys conducted by Datapro. But this year's results were the best ever for the surveyed HP 3000 customers, who we chosen by the research firm and not HP.
The HP 3000 scored higher than any other system, including those from IBM as well as HP-UX systems. The 1996 edition of the User Ratings for Midrange Systems showed the HP 3000 scoring a 4.12 out of a possible 5. The average score was a 3.8. The AS/400 came in at 3.96, while the HP 9000 was "slightly below average" with a mean of 3.73.
Datapro's analysts commented that "HP had the highest aggregate score of any vendor, with an overall rating of 3.94. This was largely due to the user satisfaction with the HP 3000 -- the proprietary HP 3000 received the highest rating of any individual product line."
Perhaps IBM's pitch to the 3000 comes from a customer philosophy, since Datapro noted that AS/400 users were the most likely to recommend their system to others. But the most satisfied of customers are going to be a hard sell for that recommendation.