A June 25 show at 8:30 Pacific time will be the latest in HP’s round of Web broadcasts about migrating from the HP 3000. The second of five HP Webcasts on May 21 featured HP’s host interviewing its Platinum partners on the subject of migrating code and choosing a new language platform — but customer questions at the end focused on emulation packages for the 3000 environment and a request for an update on the OpenMPE options. Emulation solutions from Neartek (AMXW, an Automated Migration to Windows and Linux/Unix), and Ordina Denkart were discussed. The complexity of the AMXW solution didn’t surface in the HP presentation, other than a brief description from Lund Performance Solutions’ Jim Kramer saying the software enables a migration that is “low risk; the tools translate your source code automatically with you having to do a kit of manual manipulation, and then they emulate your environment over on the target platform.” Platinum partners like Lund can provide a gateway to Neartek’s software and services. Emulation solutions will be examined in more detail in the HP August 27 show.

The emulators have a downside, according to Platinum partner Birket Foster. Porting the current environment onto a Unix or NT system and talking to an environment that looks like MPE means “they will have to pay a royalty fee during the time they’re using that simulated MPE environment.” Whether that fee would be less than the cost of making a complete migration was not discussed in the Webcast. “You want to look at your total cost of ownership as part of this deal,” Foster said, on an application-by-application basis. Emulated environments ought to be a transitional step, HP said, to buy time to work on a migration project and get to native code. But Kramer added that “it’s quite amazing how comfortable the emulated environment can be, and how little motivation one has to move off of it.” Business Development Director Joe Seiley of Acucorp said when emulators appeared for the Wang customers, the software didn’t evolve to stay current.

Acucorp, still refining its COBOL compiler for the HP 3000, weighed in with advice about copylibs in the HP 3000 environment. Most copylibs are in KSAM format, and need to be brought over to a Windows format to be used on the NT platform, for example, since KSAM isn’t supported on NT. Acucorp has a utility that runs on the 3000 which “bursts out each copy book from the KSAM file format,” said Steve Hjerpe, “so you can use our compiler there to compile on the target platform.” The Acucorp engineer also noted that the AcuCOBOL-GT compiler also supports HP 3000 entry points and macro expansion, a couple of features not available in other COBOL products for target platforms.