Number 79 (Update of Volume 7, Issue 12)

SSA puts brakes on further MANMAN enhancements

Taking a cue from HP 3000 application provider Amisys LLC, SSA announced at its conference in Las Vegas this month that the MANMAN ERP application suite running on hundreds of HP 3000s and many OpenVMS systems won't be getting any more features or enhancements by way of major releases. SSA left the door open for future enhancements, but said they would be released one by one as bug fixes are released, and not in a "version upgrade." The CAMUS user group immediately issued a statement in reply to the effect of "this isn't over yet," and users of the application started talking about how they could take over the application code and put it in the hands of more enthusiastic owners.

Warren Smith, president of the manufacturing software user group, wants to arrange a conference call of 30-50 MANMAN customers to talk about options to keep MANMAN viable. "We are thinking about forming a core working group, as well as getting the [CAMUS] RUGs involved.  This must be done sooner than later!  Shortly on the CAMUS Web site you will see a form for ideas and suggestions which we can use to get started."

MANMAN sites can e-mail Smith directly at warren.smith@danavictor.com. He'd like you to use the subject line "Manman Product Direction." Next year's CAMUS meeting in the Dallas area (May, 2003), we will have SSA GT on hand, and Smith wants input on SSA's MANMAN alternatives being put into an "ERP bake-off' of all the SSA products -- BPCS/KBM/PRMS/MAX+/MK."

Earlier this year Amisys announced that its 11.01 version of the HP 3000 application for healthcare would be the last MPE release. HP has convinced many of these packaged application vendors to stop HP 3000 development, spreading concerns about the future of the 3000's ecosystem. MANMAN's 3000 customer base, probably the largest in numbers, might be among the first to make a case for continuing with their application beyond their vendors' plans -- simply because so many of the sites are outside of SSA's support already. Making the picture more complex is the fact that SSA is a strong provider in the IBM iSeries marketplace, where BPCS is a major contender.

SSA told customers at its Global Client Forum that customers on support can move license for license to any of the other SSA products, but for the 3000 sites that means a shift away from their computer environment. SSA makes no other 3000 software, and its 12.0 version of MANMAN is its last.

In a bit of irony, Smith said that his company finds the freeze on MANMAN releases something of a relief. "The 'No new Versions' statement by SSA simplifies our program development and modification process," he said in a letter to members. "No longer do I need to be as careful when making mods so they will not interfere with future releases.  So far to date, no modifications have touched the core database (we are at 11.3). This has caused additional costs in the past, which we now will not see. I am still considering the impact of core system mods until the dust settles over the next few months - we will still stick to the path of no database changes for the near term."

The prior owners of MANMAN, Computer Associates, haven't exactly been generous with enhancements over the last decade, according to Smith. "In the past 10 years we have seen few CA supplied enhancements -- for the few enhancements that I would like to have, we either have already coded them years ago, or can add it to our internal list or utilize third parties." This might be one exit of a vendor from the application space that creates not a bang, but a whisper.

MPE-IMAGE ought to be untied

HP World meetings delivered hope to homesteading customers as promised in our September FlashPaper item. But the pronouncements about HP's intentions toward MPE and IMAGE show the company wants to maintain a close hand over the future of the 3000's heart for the next four years, and maybe longer. Why HP wants to do this deserves some serious study.

HP reports that it believes it is the best entity to take care of MPE-Image beyond its end of sales in a little over 12 months. HP is asking if open source is really a high priority for customers remaining on the platform, and the vendor is to be commended for keeping an open mind. We'd just like to see HP open its mind wider, for the benefit of its many customers who will not migrate.

While open source might be interesting, there's another, much more important activity: Getting MPE into the hands of an organization that will grow the environment's potential. Customers who will not migrate -- a serious enough portion of the multi-billion dollar 3000 business still flying under HP's flag -- need a new MPE owner, not a trusty steward who will only fix bugs and ensure nothing gets mislaid for the next four years. There's still growth potential in this market, if someone can address a sizable installed base.

We'd like to see an MPE-Image transfer to an organization dedicated to the environment's growth become a part of CSY's to-do lists. Holding onto a discontinued product, for the express reason that "we don't think anybody can do it as well," fails to serve the needs of the customers who are not moving away. I leave it as a study of business strategy for others to observe why HP's holding onto MPE-Image might be otherwise so important.

Earlier this weekend HP's Jeff Vance, who holds a seat on the OpenMPE board of directors, reminded customers who subscribe to the OpenMPE mailing list that "Nothing comes for free. Priorities need to be clear so that CSY focuses on the most important activities."

Executing a clean release of MPE-Image, now, could save HP millions of dollars, pehaps billions. Judging by the customers' wan appetite for change over the first year of the Transition, it appears unlikely that sales of alternative HP servers to the dismissed MPE-Image customers could have the same kind of impact on HP's bottom line.

All this doesn't mean that migration advocates won't have their business opportunities. It's just that this future gives customers a true choice -- to stay with a platform that still has growth in its future, or leave for the open systems world of commodity computing. At the moment, MPE-Image is fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

HP puts emulators into MPE's path

Hearts skipped a beat here at the NewsWire when we learned that HP has just begun to mail a new roadmap of the 3000's future, a poster with the word "Emulators" at the end of one path. At first it appeared the vendor was giving full confidence to the project that will produce a Hardware Emulator running on Intel chips, a way to let the 3000 hardware live on well past the date HP stops building the computer. Other customers suggested a more likely meaning for the new word on the roadmap: software designed to emulate the MPE environment on non-3000 systems, products such as Ordina Denkart's MPUX or Neartek's AMXW. Since the posters are a conceptualization of the future, maybe both definitions of emulator will apply in time.

At least one emulator company has decided to "go ahead in principle" with a project to create a hardware emulator, according to OpenMPE's chairman Jon Backus. SRI's Robert Boers told Backus that "A decision to go ahead with the design is not yet a decision to put a product on the market, which -- in our opinion -- is premature. Our experience with [our] VAX emulator is that there is no market until sales of new equipment has stopped for at least a year. This in spite of the very 'vocal' opinions I have seen in the OpenMPE forum (and also from the similar VAX community in the past). Also, emulator purchases are driven by corporate needs, not by individual enthousiasts. The many 'first hour' companies testing the VAX emulator prototype generated an insignificant percentage of revenue."

SRI, which has been selling a VAX hardware emulator for several year, will first focus "in R&D on a high performance CPU implementation (simple interpretation will not work well for a RISC CPU) and a few basic components so that we can publish a prototype for tests at large. The latter will not be before summer 2003, though."

Interex board vote impacts leadership

It's election season, and a less-obvious election might influence what kind of impact the Interex user group will have on the future of MPE and IMAGE. Two candidates are vying for a single open seat on the Interex board of directors. If you're a member, head off to <http://www.interex.org/inside/brdcand02.html> to see backgrounds on Denys Beauchemin and Dillon Pyron. Denys is campaigning from an incumbent position, and so has made public statements about MPE and the 3000's future that a careful voter can track all the way back to last December.

The great thing about incumbents running for election is the record they can stand upon. Interex members -- who still can cast their ballots for a few weeks -- can first look over a statement over the Internet from the weeks just after HP's 3000 discontinuance announcement: <http://raven.utc.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0112B&L=hp3000-l&P=R9305&D=0 >

For those with full access, you can then read Denys' Interex editorial at <http://www.interex.org/hpworldnews/hpw205/pub_hpw_news15.jsp>

(That second Web address is locked up behind a password check for Interex members only. We searched for the editorial in a public Interex area, but couldn't find it.)

We believe Denys is referring to the 3000's future when saying he means to "finish what he started." Interex inaugurated a task force about the HP 3000's condition in the weeks following last Nov. 14. Mounting a task force is the sort of thing a user group does, and worth checking up on to see what's resulted from the force.

Cast your vote in the Interex election, regardless of who you support. Better participation in the group's voting will benefit the 3000 customers who rely on Interex. Advocacy is still listed among the user group's missions, pressure that only an independent organization can apply on customers' behalf.

A-, N-Class firmware gets update

It's rare, but it's happened: HP released a firmware upgrade for an HP 3000 model. The A-Class and N-Class systems which are moving off HP's price lists -- that is, the original generation of these PCI-based 3000s, not the newer ones that just started shipping -- have got a firmware patch. HP reports the patch named PF_CPREGSPA0111 corrects a memory leak in the systems, albeit a slow one, at 220 bytes per hour.

COBOL II gets fix for performance bog

HP's released patch COBMXB0A to correct a performance slowdown in the HP COBOL compiler that appeared as of the 6.5 release of MPE/iX. Runtime performance started taking a hit as a result of that COBOL II A.04.20 version first shipped with 6.5, and HP's patch corrects the problem. While HP believes very few customer programs will encounter the slowdown, its supplying the fix nonetheless -- as well as offering proof that COBOL is still being cared for at HP.

HP hires for print and services, lays off in servers

Hiring is still happening at the new HP, but the staff is being added in areas far from HP's enterprise systems such as the 3000. The company confirmed in a meeting with Gartner analysts last week that it's hired 2,300 staffers since it merged with Compaq, and "much of that is in imaging and printing," according to HP CEO Carly Fiorina, as well as in managed services such as the recent CIBC bank outsourcing project. Rueters reported that Fiorina said many of the newest round of 1,800 layoffs will take place in HP's enterprise computing operations.