June 2004

Support alternatives ramp up offerings

Customers consider non-HP options in post-sales era

When HP unleashed a storm of change on the 3000 community, hopes for a rising tide of opportunity were on the vendor’s lips. An ecosystem would still show improvement in the years after 2001, the vendor said, even as it labeled its 3000 sector as troubled. But while much of that opportunity has rained down in HP’s favored field of migration, the levee that holds back HP’s last link with many 3000 sites, support services, is starting to crack.

Third party support alternatives have existed for decades in the 3000 community. With its customers making changes in their 3000 futures, however, new outlets are opening and others are expanding for companies that want to keep 3000s running well past HP’s plans.

Hardware support, often limited to those systems HP would not service, now is being quoted on systems HP still wants to maintain. Software support, the minefield of MPE patches and bug fixes, is gaining new outlets staffed by veterans.

Changes in HP’s own ecosystem around the 3000 have yielded opportunities. When its North American distributor Client Systems laid off significant parts of its 3000 staff, one of those sent to fend for himself ultimately joined the third party support effort. Now Chris Gauthier has gone beyond supporting MPE/iX for another company to open his own firm.

Gauthier launched Gordon Christian Gauthier Inc. (G-C-G) during June, but the new company is really a way to give 3000 sites the services he’s provided since the middle 1990s: Expertise on HP 3000s that he built and tested for Client Systems.

The company is telling 3000 sites to “just come home” to services from an experienced integrator. Gauthier spent the past year along with another ex-Client Systems associate providing Terix with an MPE help line.

Gauthier represents the MPE vet who’s determined to make his software experience pay off. He also understands that living in the support business is a matter of compromises.

Customers who can maintain their own hardware with telephone help look like a good fit. But his plan includes other companies.

“You try to talk companies into doing their own hardware support, with your help,” he said. “But this is all about partnering.” He wants to sell his time to whoever needs it. “I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere going head-to-head with anybody.”

Similar strategy on partnerships comes from Keith Burson, president of Surety Systems. The Houston-based company has 3000-savvy hardware engineers available throughout much of Texas. He says at times another MPE-3000 support company will contact him to provide “feet on the street” for a support contract they are bidding. Burson, who’s been in the 3000 hardware support business for 15 years, said he evaluates every request on the basis of a long-term, mutually beneficial arrangement.

“None of our relationships with other third parties are bad. But some are better than others,” he said. “There’s been times where another third party has bid and won a contract in Houston — but they don’t have feet on the street down here. They call me and want me to subcontract.” (See our Q&A this month for more on Burson and Surety.)

Another route to the on-site requirement is to apply MPE expertise through a national service company that’s available for hire. Pivital Solutions does its own on-site service in the Northeastern US, but adds a field support force from Amtek and ATS for other areas of the country. President Steve Suraci said software support is the company’s forte, but it needed to offer the full range of 3000 service.

“Our organization isn’t big enough to service the whole of the US with a 4-hour response time, or the 2-hour response that some Service Level Agreements require,” he said. “So we’ve partnered with other hardware service providers, but we dispatch the technician through a customer call to our 800 number.”

Another HP system retirement led Pivital to enter the support business, building on its experience backing the GrowthPower application customers.

“We had never crossed over the line into the 3000 support business until the 9x7 systems came off HP support,” Suraci said. “It’s a reassignment of our people from being primary service people to being support technicians. With hardware, 95 percent of the calls need feet on the street; with software, 95 percent of the calls are handled here in our office.”

Ready to roll over

Customers in the community are looking at alternatives to HP’s support, especially if their 3000’s duties will outlive HP’s stay in the market. But even some sites whose long-term plans are to migrate are looking to migrate systems away from HP’s support.

Donna Garverick of Longs Drug Stores said that three production 3000s and one in test development still do the heavy lifting at headquarters in Walnut Creek, Calif., and HP supports those systems. Thirty additional HP 3000s run in the company’s Hawaii stores, where Longs is doing self-support on hardware.

“We’re considering using a third party,” she said of the mainland-based 3000s. “We may switch one of the production boxes that are not leased to third party hardware support. But it’s not just the MPE boxes. We’re looking at a third party for Unix system support as well.

“We’re dipping our toe into the pool. We’ve got a certain comfort level with letting the third party support what I call lesser boxes: those we could actually tolerate downtime on. We will always have boxes here that HP will support forever, because of the role they play in our company.”

Hardware support is the first to shift with many customers, and it can lead to considering non-HP support for software, too. “We have been self-supporting on the hardware for several years now,” said Terry Simpkins, Director of ISIT for Measurement Specialties. “We are still on HP support for MPE, but I am continually thinking about it.”

Costs, always lower than HP’s, lead the reason for change. “We stopped the hardware support years ago,” said Yen Darcy, System Administrator for Vanguard University. “The reason is it was simply too costly. I got a support contract with the person we lease the machine from, and it’s worked really well.”

Better prices can be a motivation to use a support alternative, but a better attitude about the 3000 counted even more at CANNEX Financial Exchanges. “The money we save was not a motivating factor, but [the third parties’] total commitment to the HP 3000 was,” Systems VP Steven Waters said. “We made the change about six months after HP announced the end of the HP 3000.”

For many customers, a combination of MPE and hardware support companies is working well for the systems HP doesn’t want to support. “HP had dropped almost everything, so we moved the whole ballgame to a partnership of two parties,” said Keith Robertson of Comsonics. “One handles the OS, the other takes care of all hardware. My greatest concern is availability of parts, but so far we’ve been okay.”

Many customers moving away soon from the 3000 are keeping HP in place, especially if their target migration platform is also from HP. “We continue to use HP for both hardware and software support for our old and expensive 997-800,” said Steve Pittenger of Geisinger Health Systems. “We hope to be on our new HP-UX solution by Labor Day 2005.”

HP’s reductions in hardware support have prompted customers to make changes. “Long ago, HP used to make quarterly preventive maintenance visits,” said James McAllister, director of corporate data systems at Olmarc Packaging Company. “But when it got to the point that the only contact for a calendar year was to renew the ‘service’ — at a higher price — we switched.”

Some companies have taken their 3000s off support and rely on time and materials support for a system headed out the door. At the Maine Medical Center, Glenn Mitchell said only the EMC storage unit attached to the hospital’s Series 957 is on vendor support. He’s an independent consultant who acts as system manager for the 3000, and he supports it, too.

“If we have a hardware or software support issue that I can’t handle, we’re hopeful that HP or the applicable vendor will be able to respond on a time and materials basis as they have done from time-to-time in the past,” Mitchell said. “We also have some hardware redundancy, in that I have a spare 947 that has some common parts we can either cannibalize, or swap in as needed. Our main risks are failure of the CPU or failure of the single HP system disk.” The system is scheduled to be retired in 2005.

Calendar issues are putting HP’s support contracts on the bubble, giving 3000 third party support companies another shot at business HP renewed for a long time. “We are currently in the third year of a three-year contract with HP for support of both hardware and software for our HP 3000,” said CIO John Wolff at LAACO, Ltd. “I would guess that we will consider third party support far more seriously than we have in the past.”