November 2004

After 3 years, transitions go into play

Poll shows more than half will use 3000s in 2007 and beyond

Three years of worry, waiting and watching have started to produce movement in the HP 3000 customers’ transition. But the majority of them will not switch off systems by HP’s support deadline of 2006. Among those who are leaving, HP’s Unix is grappling with Windows as the dominant transition platform for those who know where they’ll go.

Those are the results from a 3000 NewsWire survey conducted around the third anniversary of HP’s November, 2001 announcement it would leave the market by the start of 2007. An e-mail broadcast of 2,555 messages yielded reports from 116 companies during the last week of October. All but three percent of the companies knew whether their HP 3000 would still be working after HP leaves the field.

The queries went out to a community-wide mailing list, rather than only NewsWire subscribers. Some of the reports included passion and problems still unresolved, as well as requests to remain anonymous while being frank about their futures and feelings. More than 20 percent of the companies said they were staying on the platform long-term with no migration plans, well beyond the year 2006.

The biggest group of companies say they will use the HP 3000 in 2007 and beyond. 59 percent plan to run their 3000s post-2006. Less than 10 percent of that group identified their post-2006 use as archival or historical.

Slightly more than a third of the companies expect to be off their 3000s before December, 2006. This 37 percent said they are either implementing migrations now, or have already completed theirs. The latter group represented a small fraction of these exiting-pre-2007 companies.

Where they’re headed

Forty percent of the companies offered reports on where they are shifting HP 3000 applications. HP’s Unix is holding its own among these, buoyed by the packaged MPE application vendors who aimed at HP-UX ports three years ago and earlier.

HP has spent more than two years improving the financial incentives to move to HP-UX servers, as well as introducing more powerful Itanium 2 Integrity servers. In the past year the 3000 community has seen enhanced tools emerge that can aid an MPE migration onto HP 9000s. But only a bit more than a third of the migrating companies, 37 percent, said they were moving to HP’s Unix systems.

More than a third of those HP-UX sites were following packaged application providers such as Summit, Amisys and Ecometry. Several of those moving off the 3000 said they were following their app vendor QSS onto Linux systems. Overall, Linux was named as the migration target 9 percent of the time.

According to the survey data, HP will be losing at least a quarter of its customers who migrate. 26 percent reported they had picked non-HP platforms such as IBM’s Unix and iSeries servers, or Sun’s Unix systems, to replace their HP 3000s. Windows customers rarely mentioned HP’s ProLiant servers for hardware.

HP-UX led Windows by a margin of 37 percent to 28 percent for the Microsoft solution. The SQL Server database stood at the heart of most of these Windows transition plans.

Glad or sad to go, and feeling bereft

Some of the survey’s respondents took the time to offer details about the challenges and responsibilities they face in their Transition. A few still harbored anger over the HP decision. Others embraced the change as a natural part of using a system like the 3000 with such a long history.

“Oh well, nothing lasts forever,” said Byron Youngstrom of Weyerhaeuser. “Having worked with MPE since the very beginning, I am going to miss the environment. The new platform that we’re moving to is less robust, less reliable, takes more time to implement and is just basically a whole lot less fun.”

The workload of rewriting custom apps is pushing many migrators into using the 3000 beyond 2006. “We plan on using the HP 3000 after 12/31/06,” said Steve Van Etten of Procurenet, “because all of our software is custom-made and we are in the process of rewriting our entire application. As you can imagine, we are pretty upset with HP for abandoning the market.”

Even the scope of interim homesteading spans the rest of this decade, in some cases. “I’m being told that this migration will start in 2007, but I think that the business will not end up migrating the application until 2010,” said Ray George of clinical diagnostics firm Dade Behring. AMAPS, running on HP 3000s, serves five of its North American manufacturing sites.

Some companies are almost completely migrated, but one application is holding up their HP 3000 shutdown. “We do not plan to use the 3000 after 2006, but we weren’t planning to be using it now,” said systems administrator Danny Knotts of Cuddy Farms. “We have migrated all of our operations to Microsoft except for one, which we haven’t been able to replace yet.”

Some of the briefest reports came from sites already migrated, often to Windows. “We replaced all of our HP applications with network-based Microsoft SQL Server apps, and all is well,” said IS director Adam Weiland at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

IT staff issues may hurry along some customers without plans to migrate today. “There is no current serious effort to replace or migrate,” said one consultant, “but we’re starting to run into issues with current support staff not being MPE’ers — and getting frustrated with the 3000 environment and application, since it’s not Windows or Unix.”

Some customers can’t see a return on investment to migrate, so they’ll homestead with caution. “The costs of migration solutions, with only a lateral transfer as a benefit, are not justified as long as homesteading is sustainable,” said Edward Harrison of Eveready Insurance Company.

There’s still some deciding going on about target environments, too. “The custom applications we currently run will not be replaced before 2007,” said Jim Haeseker of General Chemical Corp. “Still, we do plan to move off the platform. To what, and when, has yet to be decided.”

But for one company, migration versus homesteading issues were settled without research or rolling up sleeves.

“Unfortunately, we are ‘solving’ our migration issue by closing our doors,” reported IS manager Larry Folk of Iron & Steel Co. “After 81 years in business, our parent company has decided to liquidate our company in its entirety. No, the HP e3000 migration had nothing to do with our shutdown — but this certainly takes care of our migration issue!”