The information comes from a survey sent this summer by Interex and HP to approximately 4,000 HP 3000 customers. A little under 10 percent responded, reporting that they see their COBOL II use declining by 25 percent over the next three to five years.
The results seemed to show that HP has a little time to respond to customer needs for development on the 3000, but it must begin today on unpromised projects. And if the reported numbers on COBOL II usage can be applied to the base of 65,000 HP 3000 systems, then 26,000 systems are using HP's COBOL compiler.
The survey asked more than 20 questions, many of them on customers' current use of HP 3000s in development environments. SIGCOBOL, the special interest group for COBOL users on HP platforms, spearheaded the survey after this spring's IPROF programmer's forum. That forum uncovered a need to identify and create a better development environment for the HP 3000, according to SIGCOBOL co-chair Jeanette Nutsford.
A second section of the survey, which solicited suggestions for improvements to the MPE/iX development environment, was still being tabulated at presstime. Nutsford has promised "a statement from the survey committee on our understanding of the message from the survey" with the second section results.
Seventy-one percent of customers responding said they use MPE/iX systems for current development. Production systems totaled 78 percent and maintenance systems totaled 76 percent. More than half of the customers reported that they expect to be using HP 3000 systems for production in five years.
Most notably, only an additional 2 percent of the customers surveyed said they expect to deploy Windows NT and Unix servers in client-server applications during the next five years. Currently the two operating systems make up 12 percent of the surveyed HP 3000 customers' server base. Customers expect that number to grow only to 14 percent in the next five years. HP 3000s will work as servers in some method for 70 percent of customers surveyed in five years.
HP's COBOL II compiler was the leading programming language among those responding to the survey -- 47 percent use it for maintenance and 40 percent for current development. Cognos Corp.'s PowerHouse and Speedware's Speedware trailed far behind with less than 20 percent each. But plans for future development at the surveyed sites rely less on COBOL II. In five years only 30 percent expect to be developing with the HP compiler. Java and PowerBuilder will pick up most of the lost COBOL II development, according to the survey.
If COBOL is expected to shed some dominance, IMAGE and MPE will continue to hold sway at sites. Eighty-six percent of the sites are using IMAGE or MPE file types for development, and only seven percent attrition is expected in five years. Oracle's mind share will pick up nearly all of that, but only 14 percent of HP 3000 users expect they'll be using the well-marketed database within five years for development.
To curb the migration from COBOL, HP needs to develop a GUI front end soon and get COBOL 97 support in place within two years. Well over half the sites said that a GUI front end for the compiler is very important to them today. Fifty-four percent of the sites said they expect ANSI 97 standards support for COBOL II to be very important within two years.
Other improvements to COBOL II got less support. In order of importance, a screen section, report writer and object oriented technology received ratings for very important above 25 percent. An HP-UX version of COBOL II scored lowest.
ANSI standards compliance outweighed POSIX standards compliance among HP 3000 compiler users by 51 to 41 percent, ranking it very important in 3 to 5 years. More than half the users said POSIX compliance for compilers was not important today.
Fifty-six percent of all the sites surveyed said client server is not important in their environment today. In 3 to 5 years, however, 70 percent expect it to be very important. Customers said they're building client-server applications on clients using Office Suites such as the Lotus and Microsoft offerings, PowerBuilder, Visual Basic and Delphi. Within the next 3 to 5 years 23 percent of them expect to use Oracle 4GLs, Netscape or Java for HP 3000 client development.