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| Maestro is getting Year 2000 ready, but
it’s more costly
Users of the Maestro datacenter management software for HP 3000s can upgrade to a version that understands Year 2000, a vital part of a program that schedules operations. But customers who invested in the product while it was a Unison/Tymlabs package are watching their support slip into the bowels of the Tivoli/IBM empire, which bought Unison last year. This summer, Tivoli’s education group sent a cease-and-desist letter to Automated Computing Environments (ACE), the West Coast wizards who make tracking Maestro’s nuances a big part of their business mission. It was a baffling move, considering that an ACE division is a Maestro reseller. ACE co-founder Scott Hirsh — a fixture for years while he led the SIGSYSMAN 3000 system managers’ interest group — said Tivoli’s education group didn’t seem to have much regard for ACE’s 15-year background in the product. “They said everything you need to know you can learn in 30 days” about the product, he reported. The lawyer’s letters went away, and then Tivoli’s engineers started signing up to receive the ACE mailing list messages for Maestro. You can do the same by sending an e-mail with the message “subscribe maestro-l” to maestro-l-request@acellc.com. Appearances from Tivoli’s pricing and MPE staffing suggest that the MPE version of Maestro might not have such a robust future. Customers can no longer buy the product by itself, but only as part of the DCM/PAK including Tapes Plus and Spoolmate — a move explained with comments that there were too many MPE products on the Tivoli price list. The DCM/PAK purchase is three times as costly as Maestro. Then customers have filed reports on the Maestro mailing list that parts of Maestro for MPE/iX that aren’t Year 2000 compliant, despite assurances that “the Year 2000 ready version of Maestro for MPE is D.01.47.” The base date in date expressions can’t be expressed as a four-digit year, for example. Installation instructions maintain you must update your master system first — but don’t report that if you fail to update agent systems, the agents will input dates in the old [non-compliant century] format. Hirsh and ACE are tracking nuances like this on their list. The software is in use at some big 3000 sites, like Hertz and Mass Mutual. Copyright 1998 The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved |
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