HP predicts stable '09 business

HP's stock rose more than $4 a share yesterday on a company report that Hewlett-Packard total revenues in 2009's Q1 will remain unchanged from the current quarter's numbers. HP floated a preliminary report, one week ahead of its full Q4 and fiscal 2008 statement, which said the company's revenues were $33.6 billion for the period ended Oct. 31. Net revenue rose 19 percent, but that figure included sales from newly-acquired EDS.

HP's business other than the EDS services revenues grew, too. "Excluding the impact of the EDS acquisition, HP revenue grew 5 percent year over year, or 2 percent when adjusted for the effects of currency," said HP's release on the early figures. Fourth quarter net revenues in total rose $5.3 billion from a year earlier. The company finished 2008's fiscal year with record sales of $118.4 billion in net revenue, up $14.1 billion from fiscal 2007.

Earnings rose slightly in HP's preliminary report on the quarter, up 4 percent. HP's CEO said the company increased market share in some businesses. He added that Hewlett-Packard will get to the other side of the current economic downturn in better shape.

“HP delivered another solid quarter as it continues to benefit from its global reach, diverse customer base, broad portfolio and numerous cost initiatives,” said Mark Hurd, HP chairman and chief executive officer. “Our ability to execute in a challenging marketplace differentiates HP, enabling it to increase share, expand earnings and emerge from the current economic environment as a stronger force.”

But analysts said that it was HP's fiscal 2009 outlook that triggered the shot of investor confidence.

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HP pulls Polymorphic Computing out of garage

By Birket Foster
Special to the NewsWire

The CommunityConnect 2008 conference in Europe last week featured Martin Fink, the Senior VP and GM for the HP Business Critical Server group. Fink gave a talk on Polymorphic Computing. What is that, you say? Well, Fink used an analogy from the car industry, one where you have different cars with steering wheels, engine, chassis and tires that can be changed on demand. Think of the object-oriented programming concept of late binding, he suggested.

Here’s how it sounded to me, a software vendor sitting in an audience full of software vendors. Your polymorphic car would assemble itself in your garage for the purpose you need – so you could have a sports car one evening for what Fink called “a hot date with the wife,” then the next day you could order up a minivan to go shopping, and in the afternoon the polymorphic assembly garage would deliver a pickup truck so you could pick up some lumber for a do it yourself project.

The current world of virtualization will allow computing resources to be configured for different tasks. The workload will be profiled so that the CPU, memory, disc space, and network IO matches the requirement. Once you get to that stage, you could be buying your computing in a metered environment. Utility computing will finally become a reality just in time for a change of name – the current moniker is “Cloud Computing,” where your computing services get provided by a large company like HP, or Amazon or Google. In the cloud, the applications as well as the whole environment are built around the concept of a flexible billing system.

The issue that I have with all of this is the billing system.

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Moving Remembrances, Moving On

ScreenJet commissioned editorial cartoons in 2003 about HP's migration push

The HP 3000 community is moving onward this week, the first after the Nov. 14 celebration of HP's exit announcement about its e3000 business. But the news that changed the community's world first broke on November 5, 2001, when the vendor community talked openly about the rumors it heard during October of that year. ScreenJet's Alan Yeo shared his story of what receiving the news felt like.

I heard on Monday the 5th of November 2001. Interesting date, since in the UK it's Guy Fawkes Night, "Gunpowder Treason and Plot" as the rhyme goes. It is the day we English celebrate the attempt to blow up our Parliament. To be honest I'm never sure if historically the people celebrated "the attempt," or that it failed.

I started ploughing through email that day when I opened one from Wirt Atmar [of AICS Research]. It was an "open" letter to [HP's e3000 General Manager] Winston Prather (so I'm sure he won't mind me quoting an extract).

************
Dear Winston,

I have heard on Friday and Saturday through the grapevine the same basic story a sufficient number of times now that I believe it to be true:

“HP will announce on November 14 that the HP 3000 line is dead. Last sales of the system will announced to be November 2003, with support through November 2007, with some migration assistance to HP-UX being offered.” I can say that I am deeply shocked, saddened, and angry, but I’m not surprised.

Yeo answered in a reply on that Monday, "We have until the 14th to prepare for the Tidal Wave that will hit us from customers. And I know of several customer sites where just this hint will be all it takes to undermine people that have fought long and hard to keep their HP 3000s." He added this:

Representing a relatively small organisation, one of the questions that potential customers always ask is “How do I know you will stay in business to support us?” My answer is “You don’t, but as a small company we need to keep your business, and unlike large organisations we are very unlikely to arbitrarily drop a product because something else looks more promising.” I believe very good vendor support is one of the reasons that the HP 3000 has survived so long and has developed such a reputation for robustness. Little did I suspect that this would happen with HP itself.

So where to from here?

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Anniversary week winds down, goes onward

This has been a remarkable week for anniversaries. First HP's Unix — replacement target for Hewlett-Packard's favored path for 3000 migrations — celebrates its 25th anniversary. Two days later, Microsoft toasts the 25th year of Windows, the less-favored but more-often-chosen target from the 3000. Today your community commemorates the 7th anniversary of the pullout that changed our working worlds, HP's notice it would quit the 3000 business.

As we've noted in years 2005 through 2007, the exit date for HP isn't certain, although this year's lab closing makes it inevitable. Hewlett-Packard will never re-open its development center for MPE/iX, so for the few of you who've been holding out hope, the SS Return to Business will never make port again. You're porting your systems and apps, or steering a course away from HP — or at least its support business.

We asked around the community yesterday, looking for a few remembrances of that chilly November Wednesday when HP froze out its futures in your market. The stories had an air of acceptance in them. On the Kubler-Ross Steps of Grieving, Acceptance is the last. It gives the survivor the permission to move onward. You've moved, even if many of your companies still rely on the HP 3000.

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Measure HP's relative value of 3000 models

There's nothing to be bought in the 3000 marketplace now but used systems. HP has not built or delivered a new HP 3000 since early in 2004, which makes every computer sale a transaction that can be negotiated and calculated. HP has a tool to help with the calculation, an official measure of the relative performance of every HP 3000 system ever made. It's a four-year old PDF file, but it reveals a lot more than any Web-based calculator.

The figures in HP's 2004 e3000 Business Servers Configuration Guide reveal some surprising comparisons in horsepower. HP has laid out the speed ratings in a matrix, a choice which simplifies judging the horsepower of the 9x9 Series against the newer and allegedly faster A-Class and N-Class servers. The figures show why the Series 9x9s are such a great value these days. There are many more of these available 9x9s in the marketplace than used N-Class servers, since HP only built the N-Class for a couple of years at most.

As for the A-Class, almost all of it is outstripped in performance by a wide range of 9x9s. Not to slag the A-Class 3000s, but buying one of these will be influenced in large part by the age of the hardware and its ability to take on newer disc.

For example, I didn't know that the N-Class single-processor 220MHz systems run at just about the speed of a Series 959. Finding that N-4000-220-100 might be the challenge, since it was the lowest end of the N-Class line. But laying your hands on a Series 959 is easy pickings. And HP's chart shows lots of blank spots where the 9x9 servers run faster than an N-Class. Even a three-processor, 440Mhz N-Class can be matched by a Series 989-650. You will get fewer options on peripherals and greater power consumption with the 9x9s, but availability and price are swell trade-offs.

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CORE Webcast offers PowerHouse, Transact options

One week from today, CORE Migration is hosting a 30-minute Webcast on legacy migration from the HP 3000 to Windows. The company is offering a speedy migration plan: It will demonstrate how CORE migrates a PowerHouse application during the span of the Webcast. The Microsoft .NET platform is CORE's target.

CORE also has its sights set on the HP 3000 sites using Transact. This Hewlett-Packard language continues to run in some surprising places, although most of the surprise is that Transact is installed at all. The language introduced in the 1980s is a great example of a software solution that HP abandoned years ago, while its customers did not.

Whether the 3000 site is moving PowerHouse or Transact apps, CORE says that "lift and shift" is too low a goal to set for a migration. "The migrated solution must fulfill user expectations, address real needs and do more than just replace the existing solution," said the invitation to the Webcast set for 11 AM EST on Nov. 19. You can sign up for the WebEx presentation at the CORE site.

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HP toasts its Unix quarter-century

By Birket Foster

Special to the NewsWire

Mannheim, Germany — Yesterday at the Connect Europe user conference, the 25th anniversary of the HP-UX operating system was celebrated in a special session hosted by HP's Juergen Probst. It marked a milestone, not as many years of service as the HP 3000, but over a million copies of HP's Unix have shipped across the four processors that provided the operating system's path – an impressive history in the world of computing.

Guests who dropped in on the anniversary party included Brian Cox, Director of Software Marketing for Business Critical Systems, and Martin Whittaker, director of engineering for BCS. Connect's conference included a separate track on HP-UX. HP gave a good review of the history of HP-UX, then shifted into detailing gains that customers were getting in moving from HP-UX 11v2 to HP-UX 11v3.

Since HP-UX futures are limited to operating on the Itanium processor, the Itanium roadmap was rolled out, and a roadmap for versions 4 and 5 of the OS was outlined. It seems HP has done quite a bit of work on virtualization, and a discussion of the guest operating systems showed off the flexibility of the new HP-UX environment.

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3000 goes in an open direction

More than 11 years ago, HP was teaching HP 3000 skills to the world. George Stachnik, an HP employee who communicated 3000 advantages to customers, wrote a series of articles for HP 3000 newbies. In an early part of his series that started in 1997, he summed up HP's view of the system's future (Where's the HP 3000 Going?) as the company saw it back then.

The evolution of the HP 3000 has been driven by the open systems revolution that swept across the IS industry beginning in the 1990s. By 1990, most new computer applications and technologies were being developed on (and for) Unix computers. This trend threatened to leave proprietary architectures like the HP 3000 out in the cold.

In response, HP began bringing industry standard interfaces from the HP 9000 to the HP 3000, focusing first on functions that were standardized by IEEE’s Posix committees. Version 4.0 of MPE XL was renamed to“MPE/iX” (the iX stands for “Integrated PosiX”). The Posix functionality made it easier than it had been to port software from Unix to the HP 3000. Other industry standards (BSD Sockets, SQL, ODBC, Java) have been brought to the 3000 by HP in subsequent OS releases. All this open systems functionality has continued to be enhanced on subsequent releases.

Of course, that Posix functionality remains in MPE after seven successive releases. HP has not eliminated much from the 3000's feature set after more than 30 years of development. Posix makes the HP 3000 behave like Unix systems. HP was betting in 1997 that this similarity could preserve the system. Even though HP shifted its bets four years later about the 3000, using the Posix shell is a way to get an IT staffer introduced to the 3000 from a Unix perspective.

Consider that this weekend starts the eighth year of 3000 survival after HP changed its bet. Adding Posix may not have had the effect HP intended for the vendor's 3000 business. But it edged the system into open source, which could be a key to surviving another seven years.

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Keep the CALENDAR up to date

The year 2027 has been notable for customers who don't plan to leave the HP 3000. That's the year when timestamps stop being accurate, because the CALENDAR intrinsic in MPE/iX only uses 7 bits to store year information.

If your HP 3000 apps are using CALENDAR, HP advises that you use the newer HPCALENDAR. The newer intrinsic extends the 3000's date accuracy for more than 30 years beyond 2008. Yes, that's right; 2038 will be the last year to accurately store timestamps.

HP's advisory, which got referenced by its support and patch tracker today, explains the differences. At least in part:

The original MPE timestamp format was that used by the CALENDAR intrinsic, a 16 bit quantity allowing 9 bits for the day of the year and 7 bits for the year, added to 1900. Since the largest number represented by 7 bits is 127, this format is limited to accurately storing years up to 2027.

The newer HPCALENDAR intrinsic uses a 32 bit quantity, allowing 23 bits for the year, since 1900 and the same 9 bits for the day of the year. This format provides a significantly longer period of timestamp accuracy.

When HP began to talk about a Posix timestamp function that works on the 3000, the advice needed a bit of explanation from HP's 3000 lab engineer Bill Cadier.

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OT = Outta There

The 3000 community has been knit together over the past 13 years through the threads of the Internet. I mean threads in a literal-technical sense, because a mailing list and newsgroup — 3000-L, or comp.sys.hp.mpe — has spanned those years and served thousands in your world with news and views.

There's too much of the latter of late. Much of the time, this communication channel has been overturned like a box of apples and used as a bully pulpit for half its traffic. If you've ever tried to find out something about the 3000 using this group, you'll be stepping around steaming piles of opinion and "facts" and unfettered banter about killing a newly elected President. (I kid you not.)

See, the Internet has no filters for such fetid stuff. But to see it rife in a reasonable community's channels is reason enough to set your own filters beyond stun. As in "Erase without reading," now that the US had an election and there's reason to complain. Generous community members who share skills also spare us no foam from rabid opinions. The lone bit of civility is to slap "OT" for Off Topic on their subject lines. Perhaps it's just me, but asking "So no comments about the price of fuel?" seems a waste of someone's time, unless this passes for social discourse.

Good and helpful and seasoned 3000 people have sworn off this channel over the years, some leaving the 3000, others leaving the rough trade of epithets, slurs and puffery. Few of these doing the posting would say the same things in your community at, say, a user group meeting, face to face. The Internet makes rebels of us all, hidden behind the safety of that screen.

The help from the 3000-L, in providing a communications channel, was a big factor in starting our newsletter in 1995 that expanded to this blog. I started getting these messages by e-mail, and 544 other people take in this chatter the same way. There's nothing harmful in any message without an OT, and much to be learned. But this week I'm setting my filter differently for the OT. On my system I already store more than 14,000 OT messages from 2001 onward, all of which are never backed up. Every one, for good or ill from the past and into the future, is getting flushed today. Unless your skin is thick, your time ample, your social network thin, or your sense of humor brooding and prone to insult, I'd advise that you shift all the OT to Outta There.

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