Delay the decision. Even though HP’s support for 5.5 expires on December 31, it won’t keep the system from continuing to do service in the customer base. Some sites keep running releases long after HP stops supporting them, employing third-party firms for front line support — often at a savings over HP’s support. “I really do not see a problem continuing with 5.5 at least for another six months or more,” said one manager.

Third party firms have long provided such support for the 3000 community, coming from veteran firms like Beechglen Consulting (513.922.0509). “Many of our customers have invested in, signed off on, and delivered a Y2K miracle,” said Beechglen’s founder Mike Hornsby. “Most of these will run a considerable amount of year-end processing that will only see Y2K data for the first time then. Needless to say, updating now would be an unnecessary risk for them.” Hornsby added that at many Smith-Gardner and custom order processing sites, managers freeze change control from October 1 through February 1, as downtime becomes very expensive during peak order processing periods. “MPE/iX 6.5 was intended for the high-end, greater than six-processor and greater than 3.75Gb memory systems,” Hornsby said. “Updating a small or midrange system beyond 6.0 that is already at the ‘knee in the curve’ could cause severe performance degradation.” He noted that many sites are still highly dependant on HP-IB printing. Hornsby said that switching intricate special forms such as checks, member cards, or labels to DTC or network based printing “is expensive and lacks the fine operator control that the HP-IB CIPER driver offers.”

One distinct advantage of moving off of HP’s support plan is the cost savings. At Beechglen, the company charges “exactly 30 percent off of HP list price for the help desk line items (+H00). Also, customers running the systems that can’t run 6.5, or won’t run 7.0, can generate considerable savings by discontinuing their update subscriptions (+L00, +B00, +S00) for their systems.”