April 2004

Improvement ballot shows customers thinking big

SIB results tell HP to decide MPE’s future, and soon

HP 3000 users have told HP’s 3000 management they want a decision this year about the future of their computer’s operating system source code. But the winning item in the latest Systems Improvement Ballot (SIB) may become another request that HP refuses to honor.

A new strategic section of the SIB expressed the wishes of 223 voters who cast ballots during March, voters who said they expect HP to tell customers if MPE/iX source code will be released to a third party. The most popular item in the non-binding ballot — HP picks and chooses which requests it places on its to-do list — asked the vendor to decide by year’s end about giving MPE/iX a chance for life after HP drops it.

The strategic section of the SIB gave customers the first chance to ask for HP’s business actions about the 3000 — without sacrificing their votes toward tactical, technical enhancements for the system.

HP 3000 business manager Dave Wilde said the company was already meeting about its response to the ballot items in the week after results were released. He said HP will respond to the new strategic section of the ballot. HP’s initial responses to the proposals will come by May 31, he said.

“We may be able to provide an initial response to some items earlier than May 31, while some items may take considerably longer,” Wilde said.

The source code request got 1,163 votes in the polling, which was conducted through an Interex Web page. Voters, who only had to provide a unique e-mail address to cast a ballot, were given 30 votes to spend in the strategic section among eight initiatives. The source code futures request had never appeared before customers until this year.

Empowering the community with HP source code might have a negative impact on the 3000’s ecosystem, especially those companies serving migration needs. But Wilde said despite a Computerworld article that focused on that factor, it’s just one of many things HP will consider while it frames its reply to the top request.

“One of the factors that we need to consider in any business decision we make are the impacts to our partners,” Wilde said. “Of course, there are many other factors to consider. For example, how the timing of a decision would lead to the best long-term answer for the entire e3000 community; how impacts to our partners eventually affect meeting customer needs; sustainability of any decision or solution we announce; issues around security and licensing; and of course, customer satisfaction impacts across the entire customer base over the short- and long-term, just to name a few.”

Removing HP’s slowdown code that throttles performance of HP 3000s ran a strong second in the voting, and putting all internal documentation for 3000s onto the Internet finished third. Full results are available at the Interex Web site, www.interex.org/advocacy/survey/2004mpe_results.html.

HP has refused to service some customer requests from the SIB in past years. For two straight years the customers asked HP to make a complete ODBC driver package available as part of the operating system. In 2001 the customers finally pulled that request off the SIB, during a year when frustration with HP’s response was highest. In 2000, HP didn’t agree to do any of the top six items in that year’s 3000 SIB.

Some observers tried to qualify the results of the ballot by pointing to the low number of voters, calling the group a minority in published reports. But the SIB in spring of 2001 — before HP had announced it would leave the 3000 market — had only 273 ballots posted, just 50 more than the current vote.

HP has taken three months or more to respond to the SIB requests, advising customers of what they could expect to see out of the labs. This is the first year that the SIB had a separate section of 3000 requests that could be honored by HP’s business managers.

Tech requests

Technical issues had clearer hurdles set before them than the complex business challenges of strategic items. The top tech request asks HP to help make the 3000’s network printing work better with non-HP printers. The request asks for a configuration option that strips the Printer Control Language (PCL) characters from a job if the printing is to be sent to a non-HP printer. A pcl_supported = false option would be added to MPE/iX.

Only seven votes behind the network printing request is one to make the 3000’s FTP server behave more like a Unix FTP server. FTP server would support ‘ftpusers’ (users not allowed access to the FTP server) and ‘ftpaccess’ (files not allowed to be retrieved) under this request.

Gigabit LAN connectivity for the HP 3000 ran a close third to these top two items, but even MPE Forum advocates admit that the request might outstrip HP’s tech resources for enhancing the system. At No. 4, voters also asked HP to make updating firmware for SCSI drives easier. “A new procedure needs to be supplied for all users, regardless of HP support status, to update the firmware, downloaded from the ITRC, on an MPE/iX machine.”

Apache, Samba and sendmail programs for MPE/iX would be enhanced to include source code trees and build scripts if the No. 5 SIB tech ballot item is approved. These Internet subsystems started in the open source world, and having source and scripts for them will help homesteading customers keep the subsystems up to date.

SIB voters were also asked to identify themselves as migrating customers, homesteaders staying on the platform, or unsure about their plans. Of the 212 voters who identified their preferences, 100 were homesteading as long as possible, 73 were migrating off the system, and 39 were still undecided.