3000 NewsWire

Top Stories of 2006, Part 4

The year 2006 once represented a finish line for many HP 3000 customers. If you relied on the HP 3000 to handle your company business, well, by the end of this year you needed a new business server tested and ready, or a support extension from HP, or a new support provider.

HP's action of December 20, 2005 changed the distance to the finish line for many customers on the Transition trail. Sparked in part by HP's decision, users proposed a 3000 conference, warned the community about a flawed database feature, and reinvigorated user and advocacy groups which will deal with HP's endgame for its 3000 operations. Here's the wrap up on our dozen Top Stories of 2006.

10. Customers reported that HP's divisions didn't know the 3000's support got a two-year minimum extension. The 3000 group inside HP knew better, but couldn't get the word out as fast as customers were asking, especially during support contract renewals. Those contracts came to a head as HP looked for beta testers to get the latest 3000 enhancements into a PowerPatch for MPE/iX 7.5.

11. Third parties warned the community about data-corrupting Large File Datasets in IMAGE. A troika of some of the best 3000 vendors in the world — Adager, Robelle and Allegro — issued details to keep 3000 sites from creating or using any more of these "LFDS." HP responded with a report that it continued to work on a repair for the datasets, which were the IMAGE default for bigger-than-4GB datasets at the time of the warning.

12. An advocacy and user group effort continued to serve the 3000 customer during 2006. From the announcement in mid-January of the 2006 Greater Houston RUG's 3000 Conference, to the continued efforts from OpenMPE to clarify and document HP's policy on MPE/iX licensing and other endgame issues, the users didn't act like their future was irrelevant.

That kind of reaction during 2006 reflected the history and legacy of the 3000 community: resourceful in the face of problems, sharing and inventive when the need arose for combined efforts, and most of all, willing to work with whatever their vendor could do to smooth the ownership path during Transition. Whether you spent your 2006 leaving the 3000 for another platform, or dedicated the year to a sound homesteading effort, we salute your spirit.

We've been honored to chronicle your year on these blog pages and in our printed issue. Have a prosperous and productive 2007 — a year that's certain to generate another great dozen stories of your pluck and faith in one another.

Top Stories of 2006, Part 3

Let's recap. Our 2006 Top Stories List, now half revealed, includes these tall tales and breaking bulletins:

1. HP retires its Large Files Dataset project for IMAGE/SQL.
2. OpenMPE earns its first revenues from HP
3. HP uncaps virtualization plus low-to-midrange 3600 and 6600 Integrity servers
4. HP chairman Patricia Dunn resigns over a HP spying program to stem board leaks
5. HP reinstates MPE/iX Professional Certification holders
6. HP releases third PowerPatch for its penultimate release of MPE/iX

Are we seeing a pattern here yet? Perhaps the inclusion of the same two letters of the alphabet in each headline?

News from outside HP also ranked high on our 2006 list. Third parties were busy, too.

7. Advant, working from its Immediate Recovery Systems operation, released the first Generic REplacement Boxes for HP 3000s. The PA-RISC servers shipped with only a Linux distro installed, but ready for either a HP 9000 or HP 3000 personality, applied by the IRS SSEDIT program. The software modifies stable storage of a PA-RISC server, something only HP could do until these "GREBs" are announced.

8. Paul Edwards and Frank Alden Smith announced their first class at MPE-Education.com. Edwards and Smith overhauled HP's class materials for MPE Fundamentals as the duo's first step into independent, HP authorized training.

9. A high-end Series 987 server sold for less than $300 in public auction, demonstrating that 3000 hardware would be both plentiful and cheap during the coming years of the Transition Era. OpenMPE board member Matt Perdue bought the used server, which sold for six figures while new, for less than a month's worth of support used to cost for the system.

Top Stories of 2006, Part 2

Some of the HP 3000 community's biggest stories of 2006 came directly from the vendor's officials and labs. While this was no surprise four to five years ago, when HP was parting ways with the 3000's future, the vendor's reach into the 3000 customers' future surprised us during the past year. No story was more surprising than the HP admission of a spying program conducted through 2005 and 2006.

4. HP informed the marketplace and the 3000 community that the chairman of the board Patricia Dunn had started a program in 2005 to stem leaks from its dissident board members to the business and industry press. HP-financed spying, which violated HP's own privacy policies as well as California law, netted the company the name of the dissident director, but also netted the firm a $14 million fine and the general condemnation of both the business and 3000 communities. Dunn resigned as chair, the second chairman in as many years to leave the post under fire.

The privacy-violating investigation included HP employees who had helped the vendor track down and prosecute third party HP 3000 hardware brokers in 1999. One such employee said the "pretexting" used in the spy hoax had been a regular practice of HP's for more than seven years. The disgrace and distrust amassed a greater damage to the company's reputation than to its stock price — although by the end of 2006 federal officials wanted to question HP's CEO on a stock sale he executed just before the spy news surfaced.

5. HP reinstated the certification holders who'd earned HP's professional credentials as HP 3000 and MPE/iX experts. HP had dropped the IT pros from its certification program for budget reasons. Although few in number, those who held the certifications have remained in the 3000 community as consultants and technical experts at third parties.

HP restored the credentials of the IT pros as a result of lobbying and work from OpenMPE board member Paul Edwards, who worked with Rich Gossman of HP to rectify the error. Although HP won't certify any more IT pros in 3000 skills, the move opened the door to let these certificate holders stand out in a marketplace growing hungry for 3000 expertise during migrations or homesteading sustainability projects.

6. HP released the third PowerPatch for its penultimate release of MPE/iX. The PowerPatch represented HP's 2006 offering of enhancements and critical bug fixes for the 3000 — and it would have been the last bit of HP lab work for the 3000 if the vendor had not extended its support program until 2008 or later.

Top Stories of 2006, Part 1

It's a week of rest and recovery for many HP 3000 shops, but some of our readers are still at work completing migrations by year's end, or finishing off year-end financial reports. The approach of year's end spurs us to select the top 12 stories of the past year, covering both migration and homesteading resources.

1. Most recently we heard from HP that its Large Files Dataset project is being retired, even after the patch was tested and approved for general release. LFDS is likely to be the last big-scale project HP undertook for MPE/iX, IMAGE and the HP 3000.

2. OpenMPE earned its first revenues from HP this year, when the engineers attached to the advocacy group eaned a consulting fee for reviewing HP's MPE/iX source code build process. Customers still await the release of source code and those build processes. HP's ability to use the veteran community technical expertise of the OpenMPE "virtual lab" was a milestone in the history of the advocacy group.

3. Perhaps most important to the enterprise revenues in the HP financial quarter just ending, HP demonstrated that its architecture and integration with virtualization has finally come of age for the 3000 customer, with the advent of the low-end to mid-range 3600 and 6600 models of Integrity servers. The momentum HP was gaining with the fifth generation of the Itanium architecture might have sparked some rock-tossing; at the same time IBM hired an analyst to cast doubts about the future of Integrity. We've been waiting for this watershed — where the Itanium servers offer a better value as well as higher performance than PA-RISC — to appear on the HP 3000's migration path. After all, the HP Unix solution has no other hardware set to fly toward than Integrity.

Merry Christmas Wishes!

On this holiday we wish our readers and sponsors and supporters the best of this season of giving. We feel blessed to have retained the gift of your interest and involvement in the life of the HP 3000, a computer that is constantly given little respect outside its community; rarely given a chance of surviving in a meaningful role for more than a couple more years — and ultimately given the task of keeping a company running while a migration takes longer than expected, or starts later than planned.

Today we invite our readers to look over an editorial from just two Christmases ago, written long before we knew for certain HP would sell support beyond its 2006 "end-of-life" deadline. HP placed no such holiday present of an extension under the customers' tree this season like it did las December 20. About all a customer could ask for with any reason would be a clear message about licenses for MPE to use on generic PA-RISC servers. We bet HP will be sharing that message in the New Year.

It looks like Dreamgirls might be the Christmas Day movie for 2006 here at our home offices, amid a slate of slim pickings for holiday releases. You may dream of sugarplums dancing in your heads today and tonight, or a continued effort from HP to keep MPE/iX up to date until the support plug gets pulled at "the end of 2008, or later."

HP is watching what its 3000 customers do about migration, and how quickly they do it. That's why the last Christmas included the HP support extension. You can head into 2007 confident there will be others to step in and help the community. Gifts are on their way, like the late presents ordered but not delivered by the big day — gifts of tools, strategy and upgrades that can make a Transition easier.

More help in homesteading

Your marketplace waves more than one flag, as most of its citizens know. Much more unfurling takes place on the migration battlements, where projects proceed apace. But the homesteading front gains its reinforcements too. A new resource in California and elsewhere is raising its standard this month.

Data Management Associates (DMA) will be opening up two new Web sites at DMAWashington.com and HP3000HomeSteading.com. The seasons greetings card from Ralph Berkebile, CEO and Software Engineer at DMA, promises "a unique venue that encourages interaction through blogs, newsletters, white papers and industry setting updates."

DMA, which donated a $100 check to the OpenMPE advocates at September's OpenMPE update meeting, said the new Web sites will let the company "help our clients with methodologies, tools and strategies supporting the continued use of their onsite or hosted HP 3000 MPE and HP 9000 HP-UX environments for years to come."

Syngistix demise: the 3000's circle of life

News reached us this week that Syngistix is tossing in the towel as a company, after years of working to serve the HP 3000 community. More longtime 3000 customers will know the firm as Distribution Resources Corporation (DRC), an asset to companies which did warehousing and distribution as part of their operations.

Syngistix did its best to try to acquire multi-channel commerce vendor Ecometry in 2002, but the financing on that deal fell through a few months after the acquistion was announced. At that time Ecometry was a public company; when Syngistix couldn't come through with the deal, Ecometry took itself private.

Rumors among the 3000 vendor community indicate that Syngistix shuttered operations because of the intersection of two unfortunate events: declining support revenues from an installed customer base; and a late project to develop a solution to run on a non-3000 server.

This is how your average HP 3000 supplier heads for that great repository in the sky. Revenues from what has served customers slip. The launch pad for new products gets fogged in.

In the case of Syngistix, the solution is still in use at Long's Drug, but now there's nobody to call for support. Other customers decided that with the 3000 coming off HP's support lineup, dropping support for their 3000 applications was okay, too.

Software companies whose success was built upon the 3000 often aim for a new platform to keep their doors open, trying to migrate their application code to something like Unix or Windows. But that elaborate work can only go as far as the development headcount for producing the new version of the flagship product.

Ecometry was able to make this transition, and Summit Technologies's credit union solutions also made the transfer. Both companies still book support revenues for the 3000 version of their software. But each is counting more sales revenue on new platforms — and so less reliant on the flow of support dollars from MPE versions of software.

Individual companies which don't renew support sometimes have good reason to stop support payments on their 3000 third party apps and tools. 3000 budgets get raided to pay for overhauling Windows desktops, where the shift from Win 2000 to XP to XP SP2, and now to Vista, creates expensive churn. Then there's the migration efforts to fund.

But dropping support puts one more rock in the pockets of 3000 companies trying to swim to the shore of new platforms. Add enough of that dead weight, and a transitioning company cannot keep its head above the waters of change.

HP grows, senior executives go

During the past quarter HP has seen its top executives in finance, R&D and legal affairs retire or resign. It's a sign the company is both maturing and changing that the likes of Bob Wayman, Dick Lampman and Ann Baskins will leave the company. HP is much changed since these executives entered HP's executive ranks. The corportion has made the transition from a business computing company to one where consumer products and commodity PCs account for well over half the business HP books.

Wayman is probably the biggest seat to fill for HP. The Chief Financial Officer joined the company in 1969, and he's held the CFO post since the Mighty Mouse HP 3000 (Series 37) showed that business computers could run in regular office spaces. (That's 1984 for those of you without a geneaology chart of HP systems.) Wayman steered the company through the tenure of four CEOs, and even held the post for a month himself between Carly Fiorina's ouster and the hiring of CEO Mark Hurd.

HP says that its treasurer, Catherine Lesjak, will succeed Wayman. He'll remain with the company until March to oversee the transition. HP's market cap and profits haven't been this rich since before the dot-com boom, so Lesjak will have to leap high to clear the bar that Wayman has left behind.

Lampman presided over an HP Labs which developed the world's leading inkjet technology, the designs that power more than half of HP's profits today. The Labs were also one of the birthplaces of the PA-RISC processor designs, the chips which still power every modern-day HP 3000 still running in the marketplace. Lampman came to HP in the same era as Wayman, joining the company in 1971. That was an HP still developing the 3000 and MPE, designing IMAGE, and unsure if a business computer was a good product to offer its instrumentation customer base.

Baskins led HP's legal affairs since 2000, serving as Chief Counsel until she resigned under the fire of the spying probes which HP weathered this fall. Her departure left many questions unanswered about how much the top corporate officers, like Wayman, knew of the illegal investigations HP was funding to stop leaks.

Unlike Wayman and Lampman, who are leaving HP amid a record of successful transition and development, Baskins stood to take the blame from HP's CEO and its chairman this fall. After taking the fifth, the top lawyer for HP listened while HP's corporate and board leaders described her as the person most responsible for HP's biggest mistake since eliminating the HP 3000 from its product line.

A fascinating article on Baskins' role in the spying — which might well have been a contributor to the departure of Wayman, and perhaps Lampman — was posted on the law.com Web site. In part, the article says:

In the end, the HP scandal comes down to this: The spying probe became a runaway train. And Ann Baskins was the person in the best position to recognize the danger and stop it. But she didn't. In fact, the records show that from June 2005 to April 2006, Baskins raised legal questions about the tactics at least six times. But she never pushed for a definitive answer about whether the methods used were, in fact, lawful. Or, more importantly, whether they were unwise and dangerous to the company. In retrospect she could have, and should have, shut down the throttle on this train long before it crashed.

The article goes on to report about Baskins' successes with HP: the spin off of Agilent and the merger with Compaq, the latter of which included handling a civil suit levied by shareholders. But her departure under fire stands in contrast with HP's top financial and development leaders.

HP puts its best virtual foot forward

"We are absolutely the leaders in virtualization," said Mel Lewandowski, HP's guru for HP-UX. We were chatting back at this fall's HP Technology Forum, and Lewandowski said HP's designs have gone after the high availability sector of the enterprise market. That's a sector that should sound familiar to the 3000 owner, often running a server where failure is not an option.

Virtualization is HP's solution to creating a system that will never fail to deliver at least some part of your processing needs. The Gartner Group says HP has reached mainframe levels with its ServiceGuard product for HP-UX. Unix installations have long been associated with multiple instances of servers, unlike the HP 3000s driving many apps from a single host. The virtualization at the heart of the 11i v3 release lets that consolidation of UX servers take place in a single box.

HP's Unix, of course, is the vendor's first choice to capture migrating HP 3000 customers. Yes, the application is always the first consideration. But the customer who chooses Windows or Linux rather than HP-UX to host a migrated or new app is just as likely to climb onto a platform not manufactured by HP. HP's Unix keeps the hardware in the HP ledger, which keeps the even-more-profitable support revenues rolling into HP.

Lewandowski delivered solid reasons why an investment in HP-UX is a purchase for the long haul. "We're investing to outgrown the Unix market," she said, meaning that HP wants more Unix business than just the new customers coming over to Unix systems. HP believes that with the new virtualization and HP-UX 11i.v3, it's got a product that can pull market share away from IBM and Sun.

"This is actually the first forum where we've rolled out the word vision," Lewandowski said, describing the company's strategy for the HP-UX future. "I get asked, 'Is HP serious about HP-UX? Are you going to Linux?' The answer is that it's a fair question. We did analysis on this. It's a big, $18 billion market that's roughly flat in the aggregate, but it's actually pretty stable."

For the things that Unix is uniquely good at — business processing, decision support — people are confident in that and expect to continue to go there, Lewandowski said. HP-UX will continue to play from the low-end to the high-end, "because the low end is getting more powerful."

Low-end customers using HP-UX, which will include a lot of the HP 3000 migrating customers, are using a deeper portion of the stack of features for the OS, Lewandowski said. "People used to need a giant machine, and they still need some of those, but they need some of the same attributes in a cheaper machine," she said.

HP's become big on cheaper for UX hosts, now that the Montecito CPUs are driving the new 3600 Series of Integrity servers.

HP drives out the word from its Road Shows

HP hosted a mighty road tour over the months that followed the vendor's Technology Forum this fall, spurred on by the Montecito class of Itanium chips driving the newest Integrity servers. But only 50 to 100 customers per city got to see the most current story about the company's alternatives to the HP 3000. We watched in San Antonio and took close notes on virtualization, which we'll share tomorrow. For the first time in four years, the Adaptive Enterprise seems to make better sense for a growing IT shop.

There are easier bits to assimilate from these presentations — especially for the 3000 manager who's used to looking at upgrades from a hardware perspective.  After all, HP's Dave Snow — who used to trot out the newest hardware from the 3000 line at user conferences — gave one of his classic "feeds and speeds" talks about the new honking hardware in the 3600 and 6600 models of Integrity.

PDF files of the slide shows are available online now from HP. Each slide set, Virtualization and Hardware, has good details about the landing strip for the customer now in flight from the HP 3000s which have served them for so many years.

HP has sent off e-mails to invite the interested 3000 customers who didn't attend the road show. Come on, they say, at least download the slides and have a look. The links open up PDF files in a Web browser so configured. Or you can right-click on the HP landing page and same these massive files to a desktop or elsewhere on your computer.

If you weren't among the 2,000 or so customers who made the trip to a town near you, well, the presentations do lack a little color, since they're sans audio commentary and are without the customer interactions (questions) at their conclusion.

But your HP rep or reseller is  supposed to have some reason  to chat you up befor e the end of the calendar year, aren't they?

If you want to pass around the link to HP's PDF files, hand off this one; its the redirect target from a simpler HP URL that seems to be fussy:

http://r.your.hp.com/r?1.1.HX.GP.s0mFv.CYvpfy..N.ELES.2164.az1udWxs2linO2