Vendors take sides in Transition plans

Migration camp forms early; homesteaders seek options

Software firms in the HP 3000 community reacted to HP’s end-of-support announcement with varying degrees of haste, ranging from plans ready on announcement day to companies developing their strategies over the next three months or more.

In general, vendors with versions running on non-3000 platforms offered the earliest response to HP’s statements about an “ecosystem” of suppliers for the 3000. These firms want to migrate customers to other platforms, moving in lockstep with HP’s desire to compel 3000 sites to use other HP systems.

Homesteading vendors, with no desire to migrate their customers out of their revenue stream, announced fewer plans in the first six weeks of the Transition era. Application vendors with no HP-UX, NT or Linux products or plans are waiting on developments in the OpenMPE effort — one they hope will result in HP’s cooperation to extend the lifespan of the 3000’s operating system.

Vendors of the most widely-installed applications counted themselves in the Migration side quickly. Ecometry, which has sold Windows NT and HP-UX versions of its mail order software to less than 10 percent of its sites over the last year, told its 3000 customers that HP’s plans “will not impact Ecometry’s ability to provide clients with its powerful enterprise solution.”

Ecometry president John Marrah said “Although we were surprised when HP informed us of this decision, we have known for quite a while that Ecometry’s future lay with transitioning the powerful functionality of our system to Unix and NT.” The company added that existing 3000 customers don’t have to make any technology changes for as long as five years.

Other app suppliers aren’t feeling the need to drive their customers from the 3000 platform, even after the HP notice. Their calm response has been echoed by a lack of inquiries from their customers.

“Our customers have been asking us nothing about this announcement,” said one 3000 application provider who didn’t want to be named. “For them, it’s been a non-event.”

Customers are still looking at options before making plans. Typical of the early customer response were comments from Stairmaster, using HP 3000s for financial tracking using MANMAN. IT director Bob Rash said responding to HP’s announcement “isn’t a decision that needs to be made this week. The company is in the process of going through a sale, so it hasn’t hit the forefront yet. HP’s going to support the 3000 for five years, and there’s third parties out there who will support it for another three to five years, at least. There’s no rush.”

One of the community’s most ardent advocates is moving along two paths, beginning work on an HP-UX version as well as leading the OpenMPE movement. AICS Research, makers of the QueryCalc reporting application, will follow some customers onto the Unix path while planning for an OpenMPE future.

“We’re doing both,” said AICS president Wirt Atmar, one of the leaders of the stunt that created the world’s largest poster project in 1996 to promote MPE to HP’s managers. “We’re going to do everything we can to support the OpenMPE movement and make MPE a success outside of HP. I truly do believe that there might be a brighter future for MPE outside of HP than there was inside.”

At the same time, Atmar is taking practical steps to make a play for Unix business, in order to fund leadership in that OpenMPE effort. “We’re also going to migrate QueryCalc, our premiere MPE product, over to an HP-UX environment — simply because our largest single user community, those that use the credit union product from Summit Information Systems, has already committed to that move.”

Summit’s Spectrum credit union software is on its way to HP-UX, according to company officials. Like Ecometry, the vendor isn’t prodding any of its installed base onto Unix or NT systems immediately — since it won’t have a Unix product ready to deploy until June.

“It seemed more clients contacted Summit to indicate their interest to be a beta partner in the Summit Spectrum HP-UX project than to discuss the HP e3000,” a company news release noted. “The initial conversion of Spectrum running on HP-UX was completed in October. By June, the new Spectrum HP-UX version will be fully functional at a client site.”

The vendor wants to deliver “open access architecture that provides our clients with choices and opportunities so they can run their business more effectively and efficiently,” said president Kevin Sparks.

The potential of an open system might have been applied to HP 3000 to prevent such application suppliers from looking elsewhere, according to Mike Whitely of SMA. The developer of scheduling software for HP 3000s and other platforms said HP found the ecosystem wanting because of “the failure to market the e3000 as an open system, making the e3000 less attractive than it actually is to potential application suppliers.” Whitely said he’s been writing products for the last seven years to various environments, “and without exception, the e3000 took less than a day to port onto — the next easiest platform was RS6000/AIX at three days.”

Utilities and tools

For the thousands of 3000 sites running their own applications, decisions of a single vendor aren’t enough to determine their plans. These customers rely on development tools and system utilities from a wide range of vendors. Some are only now entering the 3000 community.

Acucorp reported that it expects to complete beta tests on its Extend 5 COBOL compiler for the HP 3000 soon, something of a delay from its original October 2001 target to finish beta. Spokesperson Megan Kring said the company is looking forward to entering the 3000 space and replacing HP’s COBOL compiler — software set for end of life in December of 2006.

“We plan to support our software long after HP is no longer producing the HP 3000,” she said. “We’ll be around to support the platform. We’re going after the market pretty aggressively, and we’re very interested in 3000 users.”

HP’s Randy Roten said “We are confident in [Acucorp’s] ability to provide long-term, continued support for our HP e3000 users interested in maintaining their current server capabilities or migrating to other HP platforms.” The Extend 5 suite include a COBOL debugger and Windows development workbench, new elements for many 3000 shops.

On the utilities front, suppliers such as Robelle straddle the migrate and homestead camps with MPE and HP-UX versions. Robelle founder Bob Green said of HP’s announcement that “I wasn’t surprised, although I expected it to happen after the 7.5 system announcements in 2002. I like the 3000 and have a company that depends on it, but I also think the customers have the perfect right to pick some other platform.” Robelle has HP-UX versions of its Qedit and Suprtool products installed at customer sites.

Other long-time advocates for the system expressed regret at the HP decision while announcing support that will last as long as customers remain on the computer. “Minisoft is very disappointed by the Hewlett Packard announcement to discontinue the HP e3000 product line,” said VP of sales and marketing Doug Greenup. “As long as we have customers using the HP e3000 platform, we will continue to produce new versions of our products.” The company is promoting its ODBC tool suites as a way to extend 3000 data onto other platforms, as well as enhance access for 3000-only sites.

Rich Corn, founder of RAC Consulting offering print management solutions, said the response from the 3000 community to the announcement suggests better prospects than HP could see. “I think the ecosystem is far more alive and resilient than our ‘trusted advisor’ implied in their announcement,” he said. RAC is taking a Homestead position for its 3000 customers.

Quest Software would like most 3000 customers to homestead, but like many suppliers it’s watching sales, and hoping for HP’s support of OpenMPE.

“It sure would be nice if most want to stay,” said the MPE Business Unit Sales Manager John Saylor. “For those customers who stay, or if MPE evolves into something else down the line, the customer demand for the products will be very important. We will provide products and service for these customers until they make the move off the platform.

“If customers support the new MPE and the vendors, then the MPE community will survive to another day,” Saylor said. “We have solutions to support both directions and will continue to do so until the market demand goes away.”