Transition tools serve up a new reason for HP to call 3000 sites

Since HP ended its sales of the HP 3000 on Oct. 31, the company lost a reason to contact its customers who rely on HP 3000s. A new Transition Tools Program appeared the very next business week, designed to give HP’s customers another chance to hear about assistance in moving away from the computers they have built their business success around. The program delivers its help in the form of free software, in some cases, and discounts off services supplied through the HP Platinum partners and companies who do business with Platinum firms. HP called these companies Migration partners during 2002, but sometime this year these firms became known as Transition partners, after it became clear that migration wasn’t a popular option in leaving the 3000.

This month HP is sending coupon flyers by mail to the 3000 customers which it can still reach, a document that includes one offer of a software product without a limit on how long it can be used or any required additional purchase. Acucorp is giving away a single-developer license of AcuCOBOL GT 6.0, as well as run-time licenses, for use on HP’s HP-UX, Windows NT or Linux servers after a customer purchases one of the HP servers. The company was one of five firms that HP selected for the Transition Tools offer after HP solicited proposals from companies that sell migration and transition tools and services.

Acucorp’s Joe Seiley, director of business development, said that while the software offer is free, customers should know there are other associated Acucorp products and services they may want after they take delivery of their new HP server and AcuCOBOL GT. Seiley said HP’s Alvina Nishimoto, manager of the Business Critical Systems group’s Marketing Program, invited the company “to help customers better meet the third party tool needs that exist and then transition smoothly to the new HP platforms as part of that migration.” Acucorp has been working on its MPE/iX version of its COBOL compiler since before HP decided to stop selling the 3000 and MPE/iX, engineering changes in the product to make it more compatible with the 3000’s file structure, intrinsics and COBOL II, the compiler used by most 3000 sites.

Seiley said that engineering for the MPE/iX customer base will help 3000 sites who take advantage of the Acucorp Transition Tools offer, even though the AcuCOBOL versions which are free only run on non-3000 servers. COBOL II extension support, HP KSAM files and HP Macro expansion support in AcuCOBOL are going to help 3000 sites which will move code to the other HP servers. The compiler has a -cp switch to compile HP COBOL II code with its non-ANSI extensions. “That’s one less issue the customer, or the Platinum Migration partner, has to worry about,” Seiley said. He added that the overwhelming majority of 3000 customers who have considered the Acucorp products are migrating to these non-3000 servers.

“What we’ve seen so far is that the customer interest overwhelmingly has been ‘I’m not staying on this thing, I’m moving,’” he said. “To me, if a customer is happy with their existing COBOL II compiler, there’s not a lot of value in the idea of running out and paying extra money for a new COBOL compiler as a homesteading strategy. To the extent that in moving forward, HP ceases to enhance its [COBOL II] compiler with additional functionality that users would otherwise demand, and to the extent that our compiler provides that, then customers may look at that.”

Acucorp’s offer is for the developer and run time license as well as a full year of support. It’s a deal that must be arranged through an HP Transition Migration partner, according to Nishimoto, just like the other four offerings on the HP coupon:

• An Entry level license for Marxmeier Software’s Eloquence database, including the TurboIMAGE Compatibility Extension;

• Three months’ free use of MBF-UDACentral and JDBCLink from Platinum partner MB Foster, with 30 days of free technical support for the software, and a discount on further use of the products;

• The first 100,000 lines of COBOL, FORTRAN or Pascal code (or 30,000 lines of SPL) migrated for free by Ordina Denkart (so long as that amount doesn’t exceed 30 percent of the total line count to be migrated), and a $1,000 discount plus 10 percent discount on MPUX, AcuMUX, edWin/3000 and 3K-Complete development products and 8 hours of free support;

• The first 100,000 lines of code migrated for free with Platinum partner Speedware’s AMXW application for COBOL, FORTRAN, SPL, C and Pascal, with additional lines discounted, or a free month’s lease of its DBMotion data migration product.

The Transition Tools Program requires an HP 3000 site to issue a purchase order to HP, through one of the Platinum Transition partners, for any of the following servers: any HP 9000 except the A-Class RP24xx models, or an Itanium HP-UX server, or a ProLiant DL360, DL580, DL760 or ML570 model server. The offer is limited to one free product or service per server, up to a total of four servers purchased. Customers get their free tool or service through e3000 Transition Platinum partners MB Foster, Speedware, Lund Performance Solutions or MBS. HP is also telemarketing to 3000 sites with the program; US sites can call 866-888-8920.