After being told nobody wanted to pay HP for Web-based migration training, the vendor is trotting out five free Webcasts on the subject, starting with an April 23 show at 8:30 AM Pacific time. You can sign up for one of the remaining spaces at webcenter.hp.com/cgi/desktv/csy/2418/index.pl, but you better hurry for the April show; HP only reserved 500 seats for its online slide show last time out — a curious choice considering that it believes three fourths of the 4,000 North American customers it can find will be migrating. There’s a free phone call (800.289.0468) if you’re in North America to deliver the audio on “Planning the Project,” while overseas customers can ring on 913.981.5517. Or customers can wait for the replay to be posted at HP’s Web site, a few weeks after the broadcast date.

The show promises to help customers “decide if it makes more sense to replace my applications, Migrate them or Rewrite them” and tell “What HP is going to do to help me identify candidates for the Replace It strategy.” The broadcast will also address concerns about HP’s preferred target platform HP-UX, saying, “Now that HP has announced that it will discontinue MPE/iX, how do I know they won’t do the same thing to HP-UX?” The question won’t go away; it surfaced in January’s Webcast as well. HP’s reply back then was to tout its number one rating that HP-UX holds with technical analysts — rather than give something like an ironclad promise of 15 more years of life for HP-UX.