Millware’s grand experiment to change the face of software purchases for the HP e3000 community came to an end this month, when its partner ScreenJet Ltd. bought up the Millware Web site and terminated its worldwide sales and marketing agreement with the dot-com. Traffic to millware.com is being routed to www.screenjet.com, and customers who purchased the terminal emulator and design suite will have licenses honored by ScreenJet, headed by long-time HP 3000 developer Alan Yeo.

“Registrations and software downloads via millware.com were very encouraging,” Yeo said, “but we found that there was some resistance to buy over the Web, and that customers needed a different level of support — particularly during evaluation of the GUI Toolkit —than a Web site can deliver.” ScreenJet announced the purchase of the millware.com Web site in a press release in early October, explaining that it will continue to develop and enhance the software while it pursues a multitude of sales leads generated by millware.com. ScreenJet will also be developing a sales channel using experienced HP 3000 resellers and consultants.

The development partners behind ScreenJet are Affirm Ltd., a long established HP 3000 ISV based in the UK, and and Atlanta-based Pixel USA Inc., developers of a range of emulation and PC-based user interface products. Both partners say they have made “significant commitments to the ongoing development of ScreenJet and the introduction of a new Web interface product for existing HP 3000 applications later this year.”

The company remains committed to offering its terminal emulator for free in a limited functionality version. The company’s HP 700/92 emulator and FTP file transfer client can be downloaded from www.screenjet.com. Yeo said “one of the key aims in the development of the ScreenJet products was to remove the premium that users had to pay to access HP 3000 based applications. However, one of the things that caught us by surprise was the reluctance of organizations using HP 3000s to commercially use a free product with free support.” Yeo, also a partner with MPE ISV Affirm, said ScreenJet is revising its pricing on the paid versions of its products, too: between $800 (for 32 users) and $2,000 (for 256 users), with unlimited user licenses available for $3,000. Licensing the emulator also provide the right to use the Windows Message Pop-Up software for any 3000 app.

Changes are also being made in the pricing of the ScreenJet GUI Development Toolkit and Run Time. A traditional license and support model is being adopted, rather than the rental model used by Millware. Yeo said per seat costs should be comparable, but the new pricing scheme will fund support needed to make users productive. “Our main aim is to provide the input needed when customers first start developing a GUI interface to their HP 3000 applications,” he said. “Although the ScreenJet Development Toolkit is easy to use and requires no programming or changes to VPlus based applications, for many HP 3000 developers learning what sort of Windows functions to apply to their applications can take a few days. We needed to build this support into our model.”

ScreenJet is promising new versions of products will be available during October, along with announcements of several HP 3000 third-party application roll outs with a ScreenJet GUI interface, and the latest stable release of Advanced Telnet from HP. “We are anticipating the ScreenJet installed base to grow substantially over the next 12 months,” Yeo said. He made the forecast even in the face of slowing economic trends both in North America and overseas. “In some ways the current economic downturn may even be an advantage,” Yeo said, “as rather than wholesale replacement of systems, many organizations may be looking at more inexpensive ways to improve their existing internal applications, and to provide external web based interfaces to those applications. ScreenJet is ideally positioned to deliver this type of functionality to the HP 3000, fast and inexpensively.”