HP expands Platinum partner program

Migration assistance in North America gains fourth firm

HP has added another company to the roster of firms pledged to assist in migrating small and midsize HP 3000 sites, expanding a group whose members believed they had exclusive membership.

Managed Business Solutions (MBS) was named as the fourth HP Platinum partner, joining M.B. Foster Associates, Lund Performance Solutions and Speedware as North American companies handling migration plans and execution. MBS officials said they joined the original trio of partners about six weeks late because HP’s North American HP 3000 distributor had stepped back from a bid to be a Platinum partner.

“We were unable to apply until Client Systems had failed to become a Platinum partner,” said Frank Cavillo, MBS program manager for its Platinum partner operations. “After that, HP allowed us to apply, and we were approved about a month later. I’m sure it was a big surprise to the other partners when we came on board.”

Client Systems and MBS are business partners, working from a relationship agreement signed in October of last year. “The main part of that agreement was to get access to their resellers,” Cavillo said. Client Systems wants to help all HP’s Platinum partners from an independent basis, according to MBS, so it withdrew its application for Platinum status.

The Platinum program designates companies to coordinate contacts with migration software tool companies such as Ordina Denkart and Neartek. Platinum companies plan migrations and do assessments of HP 3000 operations to determine a company’s transition strategy.

Adding MBS to the playing field increases competition between the partners, an element that has been more evident in recent weeks. For example, Lund Performance Solutions noted in a press release that it was the only US-based Platinum partner, a claim disputed by M.B. Foster Associates. All Platinum partners have the same access to the migration tools providers whose products have been assessed by HP.

MBS believes it enters engagements with no software sales agenda, however. “We can provide an independent assessment,” said VP of Marketing Anne Foster. “We’re not trying to sell software or migration tools, so we can be independent with the best interests of the customer in mind.”

Cavillo said that MBS brings “overall breadth” as its greatest strength, “the MPE experience as well as Unix and Windows experience. With HP being one of our largest customers, we’ve been accustomed to providing their application support for almost 10 years now.” Over that period, 30 different HP divisions have engaged MBS for application support, he added.

Getting applications to another platform is just the first step of the migration process, according to Cavillo. “Your people will have to get trained on the new operating systems, so we see a couple of transitions there,” he said. He suggested an approach where a company’s Y2K coordinator takes charge of a transition away from the HP 3000.

MBS has training partnerships with HP Education and Netsysco to bring application and support staff up to speed on Unix or Windows NT. “The training will be for those customers who don’t have mixed environments, but have exclusively-MPE shops,” Cavillo said.

MBS’ HP 3000 migration experience began in 1993, when the company assisted HP in moving some of its MPE application to Unix. The assistance included rewriting applications as well as customizing off-the-shelf replacement software for these HP divisions.

The company recognizes that one potential outcome for transition planning is to stay on the HP 3000, even though the vendor has announced it won’t sell the system beyond next October. Its range of solutions is labeled “Stay, Port, Build, or Buy,” and “Many of our assessments have come back with a ‘Stay’ proposition, where we tell the customers to stick to their guns, you’re okay. We didn’t want to position the assessments as a free brake check type of offer, where guess what, we find a problem with their brakes.” Cavillo also said some replacement choices could well include non-HP servers.

“The number one concern is going to be the customer. In some cases, HP will leave the customers to their competitors. We’ll work with the customer to try to get them to an HP platform, but we realize in some cases we’re not going to be able to do that.”

Regarding how to budget for a migration, Cavillo said “The biggest thing to keep in mind is how much the customer can do themselves. One of our customers we’re engaging now has a migration cost of a quarter of a million to $2 million. That’s a very wide range, because we need to understand how much they can offer up. We envision that most customers will want MBS to play the biggest role in actually doing the migration, while they get trained on the new target platform.”