3000 NewsWire

Why we were there, and are still here

It has only been two weeks since the first HP e3000 Community Meet, but I already miss the mates I met there. We were all serious about being in that hotel meeting space on a Saturday morning, a time when soccer games and family activities could call lots of people away. Keynote speaker Jeff Vance had to duck out after lunch to coach a game. Donna Garverick and her husband James Hofmeister had similar Saturday duty, but the well-known couple of 3000 advocates showed up the Friday night before for supper.

Many people might wonder what we were all doing in one place, talking about a computer HP canceled so many years ago, with a serious share of its community already migrated or on its way. We gathered to be thinking together, learning and sharing ways to steer the future forward, toward our desires.

See, through that sharing we could hope to transform that ledge the community feels — even now, more than six years after the worst November news most community members would hear — to turn that ledge into an edge, and see what might be, to grab the advantage of imagination.

People misunderstand each other easily these days, especially in the enterprise computer business. Early on in the weekend I saw a series of pictures of shoes, taken in a factory which uses HP 3000s, snapped by Birket Foster. Then we saw our commemorative shirts, handsome with a nerd-style pocket on the front. I must have been putting the shoes and the shirt together, because when somebody climbed into the car on the way to the supper, they announced that "now we have a socks expert on board."

I was delighted to be confused. "Hey, socks," I said. "Now that's a great commemorative for the next Community Meet." Imagine the howls of laughter when I realized out loud it was SOX standards, not the footware, where our newfound expertise was riding.

After lunch I asked those who remained at the meet to imagine the first day they began with the HP 3000. (I'm still after those stories for the history book.) That first day, I noted, was also the day when your 3000 career began to end. The ending has taken decades, really, with enough time for legacy and legends. I entered this marketplace when running an office computer on carpet, rather than a raised floor, was a new feature. The Mighty Mouse System 37 didn't even need special AC, something new for 1984.

Even then HP was pushing toward its Spectrum project to implement RISC, a technology IBM had already given up on. Meanwhile, Digital had 32-bit computing that Spectrum was still years away from giving the 3000 world. "Digital Has It Now," crowed the silver ads in the trade weeklies of the era. Now HP has Digital. You never do know how things will turn out.

Later we saw the Multiple Operating System Technology take its first turn as an HP 3000 project to put Unix and MPE together on a single system. HP never finished or released the project, at least not until the Superdome systems emerged to deliver the same kind of multiples — minus MPE. At least at the same time the 3000 was entering a renaissance with open source and network and Internet capabilities, plus a general manager in Harry Sterling who was serious about making a stab at new business. The end of the 20th Century still found HP as a vendor that wanted more 3000s in production.

HP's effort at attracting the new and retaining the current community culminated in the PCI-bus systems. There's still video in my archives of HP's Dave Snow waltzing down the aisle at an IPROF conference with the first A-Class server under his arm. He walked with the grin of a bridegroom escorting something lovely.

At the end of this November I am more certain that ever that yours is a community unique among the computer world. HP's exit announcement in November was anticipated, but still as unscheduled as the indictments against baseball's Barry Bonds. That's another controversy with an undefined conclusion, although like the 3000's future, attracting lots of forecasts of doom.

Jailing a baseball legend might prove as difficult as keeping people away from a meeting room on a Saturday. You are a curious, connected community, not an ecosystem. The difference is that a community has more intelligence and more heart than an ecosystem. It can be more enduring, too.

We are clever in the face of unsolved problems. A week after a tanker dumped 60,000 gallons of oil into the San Francisco Bay, we were reading about how the Oiled Wildlife Care Network was helping in the cleanup. Maybe as disrespected as OpenMPE, but the Network was surely as unforeseen as OpenMPE too. A network dedicated to cleaning spills off birds and sea mammals? A group of volunteers who talk with HP about the future of a product the vendor has already canceled?

But there are always going to be new solutions appearing to solve old problems even better. The march to migration has made great strides in products and services, not withered away according to some promises. Besides, a good deal of time remains before every migration must be completed. Twenty years and one month, as of today, the moment the CALENDAR intrinsic will render the 3000 incapable of knowing what day is today.

So we gathered in that room and connected in our community to bet on the value of those future years, whether we go or stay, homestead or hope to move away. In the next several months we will hear more about HP's new SCSI-pass through driver and how hard or easy it might be to use; HP's new business model, being crafted with every OpenMPE meeting, for retiring HP's other proprietary products; and what HP has to share about open source updating methods, to keep the late 1990s renaissance from growing stale.

One of the longest-tenured solution suppliers in the market believes in 10 years time most of the world's computing will be done from server centers far removed from the companies using them. Owning a server will be rare, as rare as owning a telephone switching system is today. It's hard to tell what will be "survivor technology." People might have figured radio would be dead by 2007, but in fact it's the entertainment and information source most used by most people. All that time in the car, listening. Maybe even more waiting at a railroad crossing, as those other survivors, rail lines, still do their service.

Could we gather in San Francisco to promise a 3000 future? Yes, but no promises on how long that future will run. Keep thinking for yourself, I told the post-lunch attendees, to turn that ledge into an edge. Then I stole a departure line from Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" to make my exit from the speaker's stage: "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch." All three were reasons for why we were there: to show we were well, share our good work, and keeping in contact as a community.

IBM sends PowerHouse users a signal

Not long ago IBM announced its purchase of Cognos, the creator of the development language PowerHouse. The language continues to drive HP 3000 applications in places too diverse to track down, but there's a lot of PowerHouse still running out there.

David Ivey of id Enterprises says that the IBM purchase is a clear signal that the 3000 customers who use PowerHouse need to get serious about moving off their 3000s. The acquisition is both "an opportunity and a spark" for his company which has specialized in HP PowerHouse development through the past two decades, as well as its more current offerings of migration, Ivey says. Primary targets for migrating PowerHouse sites are Windows solutions, especially employing Visual Basic and Visual Studio.

"IBM's purchase once again emphasizes that the 3000 has a limited lifetime, and you need to make preparations to move off it," he said. "You need to have a plan and get busy."

"I love Cognos and PowerHouse, and it's been fabulous for my company," he said. Large complex  systems could be churned out "so much faster than in Business BASIC or COBOL. "But PowerHouse's time is gone now."

He added that PowerHouse "doesn't just quit working" to prompt a swift and emergency exit from the platform. But when one of the largest software companies in the world takes in a company for millions in cash, it will look closest at the biggest earner among Cognos businesses. Not the best of prospects for looking after PowerHouse's future.

Most community observers and experts such as Ivey agree that IBM has little interest in the Application Development Tools (ADT) segment of the Cognos business. The group which still releases updates and minor upgrades to PowerHouse generates less than 5 percent of the Cognos revenues. No, IBM wanted to acquire the Business Intelligence customers and products in the Cognos stable.

Ivey said he sees little chance for any company to extract the ADT group from PowerHouse. Negotiations with IBM are a complex matter. More to the point, there's the limited prospects of  a new owner increasing the PowerHouse user base against more modern solutions. This would be essential to buying out the PowerHouse business to turn a profit.

"I don't see how anybody [who purchased the ADT group] could survive in a world with Microsoft and those tools that are out there now," he said. "Why should I go to a proprietary [development] platform that nobody's ever heard of, — whose software costs are expensive — when I can go to platforms that everybody knows about and there are programmers all over the street who can code in them?"

Ivey added that his company, which supports PowerHouse sites as well as helps to migrate them, "has customers on the 3000 who haven't taken an update in 10 years — and I wouldn't let them, because there's no point to it." Locked down PowerHouse apps are the most common kind in the 3000 community.

One unique benefit of the PowerHouse offering is its QSCHEMA, a repository of data dictionary items which all PowerHouse apps call upon. Ivey said even when moving away from the dictionary, he doesn't believe much will be lost. His migration strategies for clients often replace the IMAGE database with Microsoft's SQL Server.

Moving the schema to Windows can be done with some third party tools, "but the database structure differences that you don't gain a lot. I recommend bringing the schema over as a text file and then just cut and paste some of the names. It's almost better to type in a lot of that directly than to try and convert it."

The data dictionary "is a big deal, and I have looked for a similar on the Microsoft side, and I haven't been able to find one that was satisfactory," he added.

But PowerHouse is not a graphical environment, and "a screen that I can do in a minute with Visual Studio, or C+ or S-Sharp lets me import graphics with a drag and drop."

XML makes its entry into the 3000 workflow

[Editor's note: XML is an important data exchange technology that can use a focused tool suite for HP 3000 customers. The entry that follows explains how the latest XML solution gets the job done in the MPE/iX enterprise. Making a business case for using XML is detailed on our Nov. 27 entry.]

By Peter Prager

XML, which is a self-documenting, flexible data format, should give organizations an edge by providing reusable and repeatable standards which can be utilized throughout their business processes. XML Thunder, an XML suite from CanAm Software, visually enables all data mapping, conversion and error handling required for reliable XML-processing. This frees up developers to focus on business issues — a  time-saving advantage when compared to compiler-dependent solutions.

XML has many benefits, but it is a complex technology featuring hundreds of rules. XML program development is an ideal target for automation as the rules are numerous, but very well defined. An XML handling program must implement all relevant aspects of the W3C rules with stable, efficient code. This code has to provide appropriate handling of simple and complex types, XML structures, features and error processing. More importantly, it has to be robust and reliable in order to handle mission critical data that organizations rely on for their business.

How does it work?

XML Thunder generates COBOL and/or C sub-programs that can be invoked from a main business program. These sub-programs are referred to as XML Handlers. XML Handlers do the actual XML processing on data received from the main program. The mainline interfaces with the XML processing sub-programs through a special data area called the Interface Data Structure or IDS.

There are two types of XML Handlers, XML Readers and XML Writers. An XML Reader is used when the content of an XML document needs to be made available to and processed using traditional COBOL or C data structures. When using an XML Reader the mainline may obtain the XML document in any manner which is suitable, e.g. MQ, RDBMS or a sequential file. Once the XML document is held in memory, the mainline will pass it to the XML Reader subprogram that was generated using XML Thunder. The XML Reader will parse the content of the XML document according to the design time rules and will pass the content back to the mainline in regular data structures for further processing.

An XML Writer is called from the main business program. Then an application needs to create an XML document. The main program will pass data using regular data structures to the XML Writer, which will construct the XML document from the data based on design time rules specified.

The generated code is entirely ANSI COBOL/C source code, without any hidden runtimes or executables.

Think of XML Thunder’s flow as consisting of three major steps: Select, when files are selected containing the XML schema/DTD and/or COBOL/C structures; Bind, when COBOL/C variables are mapped to the desired XML nodes; and Generate, when COBOL or C program code is generated implementing the XML Reader/Writer design.

Selecting

XML Thunder allows developers to import existing files to assist with the creation of the XML Handler definition. These files can be either from the COBOL/C or from the XML world.

COBOL/C files could be COBOL copybooks, a COBOL program or a C header file. The COBOL/C (known as IDS) data structure will be created based on the XML information.

For XML:
XML Schema
XML Document
Document Type Definition (DTD)
Derive from IDS
The XML data will be created based on the COBOL/C (IDS) information.

Or still, a combination of the files above, or no files at all (the XML Handler will be created from scratch by the user)

Binding

Once the XML Handler definition is created based on the files imported, the developer needs to map the COBOL/C variables with the XML nodes. This is easily done using the graphical interface, through drag-and-drop.

XML Thunder will try to create the mapping, depending on the combination of files used in the selection step. If the imported file is an XML Schema (XSD) or DTD, then the corresponding COBOL/C data structures (IDS) will be automatically derived. XML Thunder creates all necessary IDS fields based on the XSD/DTD, and then maps each XML node to its corresponding COBOL/C field.

XML Thunder can also derive the XML Schema (XSD) from an existing COBOL/C data structure. To simplify things further, a wizard assembles an IDS from an existing COBOL program’s working storage by simply pointing and clicking. When deriving an XSD from existing data structures, XML Thunder also performs automatic mapping of the XML nodes and COBOL/C fields. Of course, these mappings can be deleted or easily changed if desired.

When both the COBOL/C data structures and the XSD/DTD are provided, then developers can perform manual mapping.

These features of XML Thunder maximize automation yet preserve flexibility, resulting in developers’ complete control over the XML Handler design. Once the XML Handler is designed, the next step is source code generation.

Generation

During code generation the actual COBOL or C sub-program, implementing the design time mapping rules, is generated. The generated XML Reader or XML Writer subprograms can then be integrated with the main business program to parse or create the appropriate XML documents. An Integration Wizard makes the task of integrating these handlers quick and easy.

With a few exceptions, the same XML Handler definition can be used to generate COBOL or C language code and as either an XML Reader or an XML Writer.

Once the appropriate XML Handler is generated and the mainline program changed to call it, they can be uploaded to the appropriate target platform, compiled, linked and tested.

Peter Prager is Director of XML and Reporting Solutions for Canam Software Labs. For more information about XML Thunder and to download a free trial, visit the Canam Web site at www.xmlthunder.com. The company also offers an online walkthrough of the solution at its Web site.

Integrating Benefits of XML for HP 3000s

By Peter Prager

Data exchange between different platforms, such as HP 3000s and Windows workstations, is complex, requiring significant knowledge and investment.

As vendors have tried to further protect their intellectual property with proprietary data formats, the challenge of exchanging data in a heterogeneous computing environment involving a variety of platforms has been growing over the years.

This issue has been substantially heightened with the B2B use of Internet technologies, where a large number of different platforms need to share data. This is especially true when considering the increased requirement for national language support.

XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language and was defined by the World Wide Web consortium in mid-1996, based on the SGML meta language. As XML’s main purpose is to enable any data in any national language to be shared across different computing platforms, it has increasingly been a natural solution of choice.

Similar to Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards, XML is fully text-based, and its most important unit is the character. One major difference is that XML is a self-describing data representation language, including both data and meta-data, which results in platform independent, ubiquitous self-documented data that can be used on any computing platform

The benefits of having one self-describing data format administered by a central organization, and that can be used by any information system, have caused many organizations to shift their own policies towards proprietary data formats. Even large standards organizations, such as SWIFT and ANSI ASC X12 have moved their respective standards toward XML.

An example of XML’s strength and its effect on business can be seen in the public sector in Denmark. Mandated by law effective February, 2006, all public sector organizations can only send/receive invoices in XML format (through the UBL Invoice standard). The estimated savings from the use of one standardized document type has been approximately 100 million euros per year.

Automated XML-enabling

While XML is a mature and well-established standard, the reading and writing of XML messages using standard procedural languages — like COBOL and C — is a complex task. It traditionally requires intricate understanding of both the programming language and XML itself.

To help developers overcome the complexities of XML and its complex programming requirements, Canam Software has developed a solution, XML Thunder, that bridges the two worlds of XML and procedural languages. This also empowers software professionals to take advantage of the benefits of XML without going through the usual steep learning curve.

This solution creates a level of abstraction between the COBOL/C program code and the rules of an XML document, allowing a highly productive, agile, low-maintenance, and repeatable programming model.

XML Thunder is a visual development tool that generates COBOL and/or C program code that creates (via the XML Writer) or parses (via the XML Reader) XML documents based on their specific and unique design.

The business case

While XML integration on various platforms has been a costly and time consuming task with alternatives that have included changing development languages, production platforms or both, XML Thunder is a solution that allows organizations to retain their existing production environment and development language.

XML Thunder shields COBOL and C developers from all the rules and restrictions of the XML technology. It enables them to create XML-processing programs in their familiar computing environment without having to learn a complex new technology. The objective is to enable organizations to use XML within their existing applications and platforms while minimizing the risk and cost associated with application enhancements, rewrites, or platform moves.

Existing production systems are the workhorses of organizations. They are mission critical and represent a significant investment in development and maintenance resources. Using XML Thunder, mature and mission critical production systems can be modernized with minimal risk and cost, utilizing existing resources.

This results in the best of both worlds: The opportunities presented by XML and the proven reliability of existing systems such as the HP 3000-based applications. From a business perspective, the lifespan of the existing system can be extended, thus increasing its overall ROI to the business area using the application.

Details of how XML Thunder works will be covered in tomorrow's blog entry.

Peter Prager is Director of XML and Reporting Solutions for Canam Software Labs. For more information about XML Thunder and to download a free trial, visit the Canam Web site at www.xmlthunder.com. The company also offers an online walkthrough of the solution at its Web site.

Leaves and information fall faster here

The fall months brought far more than a change in weather and the colors of leaves. This season has served up many a transition for your community and the computer world as a whole, but none was so profound as the 3000’s Extra Two Years.

I was glad to have this online vehicle to keep up with the news all through October and into November. Not a bit of irony escaped me as I noted HP’s announcement date for a critical data corruption patch: Oct. 31, the day celebrated as a Worldwide Wake for the 3000 four years ago, the last day HP sold the system.

So now 48 months have passed, a full year of them beyond HP’s first “we’re getting out” date, and the community remains on the system in large numbers. About a third are already departed from your community, their migrations or replacements or re-hosting complete. But the rest of the user base needed those critical patches, those that HP announced primarily over the Web on newsgroups, Web sites and mailing lists. HP has sent word by way of the postal system, too. Quaint but comprehensive.

HP gave the NewsWire a cordial pre-announcement access to both news items. A full week in advance of the Mature Product Support announcement, I got a thorough briefing and a good while to ask questions. The patch releases were revealed to me just two hours before the rest of the world learned. Afterward, I got to pretend I was a newspaper reporter once again, working with a 90-minute deadline.

The best part was refreshing the HP Web page, minute by minute, on Oct. 31 to see when we could uncork our own coverage up on the blog, staying in tandem with HP's schedule. On that same afternoon we sent more than 2,000 e-mails to announce the story, a total maybe higher than the 3000 newsgroup and OpenMPE readership.

Not that I’d want to boast about all of our handling of the excitement. In a few days after HP’s critical patch announcement, I’d stumbled on the assumption that these binary-level patches had been less tested than the fully-integrated repairs HP usually General Releases. A friendly HP e-mail netted an hour of work to fix the errant stories, which were only posted to the blog on the prior day. Not a lot of community scrutiny surfaced over HP’s patches, but when Alfredo Rego and Stan Sieler pose queries, everybody in the community should listen up.

The news of the Mature Product Support came with an assurance that no patches will be developed after December 31, 2008. So your risk of running an HP 3000 will increase, HP figures. A month after the support extension, I asked if this kind of corruption patch, in binary form, would be among the kind that HP won’t develop during 2009. Nope. You can still expect this kind of critical repair, even during the “Without Sustaining Engineering (patches)” era of the Transition.

Those questions for both announcements, well, I got to ask them old-school over the telephone. Quaint, but comprehensive procedures. There has never been a better time to be a business and technology journalist, even with access drying up to companies' employees, officials and execs. Talk it up over the phone, add e-mail polish and review, then publish rapid over the Web. Information has never flowed faster here.

Golden, Open opportunities in '08

OpenMPE is not some government entity with a roster of voters to look up and scrutinize. I saw a membership roster in 2003. Only 125 names back then, but not even half were vendors. Consultants, some. But also customers.

As for the voter names, I get a list of those each spring to oversee the annual election. I cannot share those, but yes, even in their limited numbers, they represent the viewpoint of a customer trying to get a workable solution for the near term.

No tax dollars are not at work at OpenMPE, any more than they are inside HP. Member and voter identity is protected on a privacy basis, just like customer lists at HP and third parties. Insisting that this group of volunteers mimic the government’s information revelation is not an unusual request. But it’s just not going to happen, until these volunteers get support contract monies from 3000 sites. That will make OpenMPE accountable to their customers, in some way. That may never happen, given these HP extensions to its support business. On the whole, the extensions look sensible until you consider their impact on OpenMPE’s desires.

As for what the organization is doing right now, several times a month the board meets by phone conference with HP’s Jeff Bandle, as they did with Mike Paivinen before him. Projects such as OpenMPE review of the HP MPE/iX build process investigation — “hey, what does it take to create a new MPE/iX build, or a patch?” — that’s the kind of project OpenMPE is involved in. One such project has already taken place. OpenMPE wants the 3000 group in HP to be involved in two more such reviews.

Also, OpenMPE got HP to announce the extension of support earlier in 2007 than HP had planned. You may recall that the 2005 announcement — where 2006 didn’t mean 2006 anymore, and the companies who hurried and spent plenty learned they should have waited and spent more gradually — that 2005 announcement got dropped on the community and customers during the holiday hiatus. Bad publicity, awful exposure.

This year’s announcement came much earlier, during the period when 3000 sites were planning 2008 budgets. The OpenMPE calls are all covered under executive sessions. HP insists. HP holds all the cards in this relationship.

The flaw in approaching the 3000 market from a spot of selling mostly migration solutions is that the solutions and viewpoint becomes a hammer, the kind that makes every 3000 problem look like a nail. “Just migrate,” people say, “and it will all get safer and easier.” But the migration experts who are ready to help, they know — a migration is the most complex IT project a shop will undertake. Some take a matter of weeks or days. Others take years. They are fraught with pitfalls and learning. Most of them make the Y2K work seem simple by comparison.

Homesteaders have limited budgets, operate systems often frozen down, don’t test patches, take few upgrades. This has always been a belt-plus-suspenders marketplace. Homesteading is the easy path of no change. Shifting a 15-year-old application suite to new code, new compiler, new database, new OS, that can feel like cowboy stuff to a 40-plus 3000 director.

And there’s no hurry or firm deadline, especially if HP support has become a thing of the past for a customer. By my estimate no more than 1 in 3 HP 3000 customers now take MPE/iX support from HP. This is a marketplace accustomed to a decade or more of value from an enterprise server purchase. The current generation of HP 3000s, the A- and N-Class servers, are only finishing their sixth year of active service in the market.

So what’s Open about OpenMPE? There’s an open dialogue with HP about how to make the homesteading, whether interim or for an indefinite future, easier and more affordable.

Maybe OpenMPE will have no future with HP, in the long term. But nobody else in the community is taking up the prospect of how to create patches during 2009 and 2010, when HP quits. And to think that nobody will need a patch for a 3000 in that period is a bit innocent, if you ask me.

So who is OpenMPE? The directors, almost exclusively, people whose pictures and names and bios are up on the Web site. As well as those who have served on that board in the past, for free. If OpenMPE went away tomorrow, how would the 3000 community, which will be working at least through 2010, benefit? The group’s executive conference calls help HP plan the details of its end-game. HP says so, and says the group has impact. And after the disgraceful melt-down of Interex, the 3000 community needs some kind of HP advocacy.

At least OpenMPE gives the homesteader a rally point. The organization intends to create a community to help customers continue using HP 3000s. The system will be running until 2027, when the CALENDAR intrinsic goes out of date. The future of post-Hewlett-Packard 3000 use: that’s OpenMPE’s mission.

The coming year shows great promise for anybody still a-foot in the 3000 world, aiding in migrations. or creating a new infrastructure for their 3000s, sans HP. Many are happy to be going onward, grateful for what they’ve learned. This month the keynote speaker for the Bayside e3000 Community Meet, former HP-er Jeff Vance, will talk of the exciting new technology which fills his day. Vance migrated away from 3000 work after 28 years.

On the other side, I got an e-mail the other day from a system manager at Health New England. Jonathan Hale was reporting on the departure of the group’s HP 3000s. “I now regularly quote from the Unix-Haters Handbook,” he said, a volume that can be read for free online, after a healthy life in printed form.

People have left the 3000 (more than a third), or are considering and planning migration (another third and more). But a significant chunk of the customers are homesteading for this year and next, staying in place for that duration. All of these groups offer us all more months of opportunity, even the homesteading sites. I heard last week from a vendor who’s been in the 3000 market since 1988, “there’s still gold in them thar hills.” Here’s to a golden 2008, no matter where you are prospecting.

Spelling thanks with an "e"

On this day in the US, we give thanks for what we love in our lives with a big meal, connecting with family and friends. It's a rare thing for Abby and I to be away from our Texas home and NewsWire's offices on this day. We're usually hosting holiday guests, but this year we're on the road, visiting my family in a little town on the leftmost edge of Lake Erie.

As I sit here in an Extended Stay Suites room, waiting for all the feasting to come, I am reminded of that E in Erie. The lake's name still draws sniggering, maybe the same kind you've heard about the HP 3000 in your shop. Yes, it is that system older than all of the rest, but as vital as a Great Lake with freshwater. Something common but essential, and yes, something to be thankful for.

That E also reminds me of something Alan Yeo said about the HP 3000. HP started to call the system e3000 back in the year 2000, a marketing move to prompt a new look at legacy technology. Yeo wrapped up last weekend's 3000 Community Meet by saying that e stands for enduring. It's one of the many e-things we can give thanks for as 3000 community members:

• Extensions, of support by HP to keep the vendor officially in the 3000 business, and of support from the third party suppliers and 3000 gear from resellers. About the only thing really missing now is new systems.
• Exploration, by the OpenMPE board, still seeking a way to extend the problem-fixing patch process once HP leaves the community
• Excellence, from the 3000 solution suppliers who have built products with durability and rugged design, like Adager's Alfredo Rego says, as if they are deep space satellites which must operate for years without need for maintenance, so your IT duties are more manageable
• Enthusiasm, from the vendors discovering new ways to migrate several decades of business logic to new environments. Everybody tells us that the application makes the most difference in choosing a new platform. The platform makes the most difference, however, when the application is already written and reliable on the 3000 — and it requires patience and innovation to carry it into the future.
• Exactitude, from those caring for a 3000, either by proxy or at your site, as well as the exacting development of solutions to mirror the talents of IMAGE, MPE/iX on other hardware, and more. Excellence is required.
  

As for Abby and I, we give thanks for the Excitement of covering a vendor's End-game, to chronicle the Evolution of your community to an independent Entity. Enjoy the holiday.

More beyond than behind

Another two years, HP says, and it will be closing up its HP 3000 support business. Will that 2010 date mean the end of migrations, or homesteading, or the community? Not by my figuring.

I like to do some fun figuring here when I glance at the calendar. By December 1, The 3000 NewsWire will have pursued 3000 news and delivered issues and blogged reports longer in the post-cancellation period than before it. And 2008 promises to be a fun year to keep telling stories. After all, HP’s still going to be in the business, supporting us and you.

After all, why give up now? HP’s 3000 support business is a profit center. Until its resources retire or shift to other HP projects, keeping those doors open in a limited way is an easy choice — or easy if the decision-maker works in the HP Services group.

But this makes the OpenMPE initiative worry, concerned that yet another two years will elapse before HP must keep its promise and turn over the keys to the MPE/iX kingdom. That move would give OpenMPE a chance to become more than advocates. Right now, some community members see OpenMPE and homesteaders as worn-out horses, thoroughbred but as blinder-ed as any aging racehorse relegated to harness racing.

This is a short view, by my analysis. First, OpenMPE isn’t any less open than HP’s 3000 business group, which cannot say how many engineers still work there, what number of customers continue to receive PowerPatch tapes, how much business the group books, and a host of other details. Millions of dollars are sent to HP on behalf of 3000 customers, but the business is no more open than HP decides it should be. It’s a profit-driven operation, just as it should be.

But oh my, put OpenMPE in the same harness and its critics revile the volunteer effort. How can it be open when the member list is unknown? What are the group’s true objectives? Is this group just a handful of vendors clinging to the past, hoping to continue to make money off MPE?

In order, the answers appear to be
1. It can as open as it wants to be, just like HP and its 3000 group.
2. Its objectives are the same as they were nearly six years ago — to make a life for the 3000 beyond HP’s business schedule.

Please note, HP’s extensions of its 3000 support now total almost as much extra time as HP first allotted to the system’s lifespan (five years promised, now four more years extended.) Or as Gavin Scott put it at last weekend's e3000 Community Meet, the extension period now represents 20 percent of the entire HP 3000 lifespan.

As for the final question, it’s the most important query. Yes, the OpenMPE volunteers (exactly nine) and supporters (perhaps a few hundred, including The 3000 NewsWire) are hoping to continue to make money off MPE. Yes, profit motives are afoot in business here, and elsewhere. That’s capitalism and initiative and looking out for yourself. People who have been around this community a good while — I’m 23 years in here now — have always embraced thinking on their own. They had to, once HP decided the 3000 was going to be a minor player in the enterprise strategy, say about 15 years ago.

Homesteaders are not kooks or luddites, and migrators are not lemmings or budget-busters. We believe they both have a place in our community, like liberals and conservatives and yes, even libertarians, to get a little political.

One migration and homesteading vendor (maybe that would be a libertarian, to stretch the metaphor) thinks that not more than 35 percent of the 3000 sites in the UK are already migrated. This month, six years after HP’s “we leave you” announcement, about two thirds have not finished the job. Some will retire before that finish line arrives for them.

We believe that homesteaders make up about 25 percent of the 4,000 or so our estimated HP 3000 installations. These are companies unable to afford a move away from the 3000. The cost they don’t want to bear is disruption.  A major backup vendor said in 2004 that one of their homesteaders had a run rate of $50 million. It’s not all small companies.

I heard another migration story about Interstate Brands this week, and not a pretty tale. Seems the company has had to go into Chapter 11 — and part of the foolish spending was an SAP conversion project, a vehicle which hit the wall trying to  migrate away from the 3000. A $60 million project. The 3000 is still doing day to day work there. It appears Interstate could have used some help.

But yes, I think someone, and more than anyone, will stay on the 3000 for years to come. You are homesteading until your migration is complete. Temporary is a word that probably doesn’t fit for a 3000 still in production in 2008.

Some users have given only this much consideration to a migration plan: “Sometime in the future, I won’t be able to buy a part, system, upgrade or service for this server. When that time comes, I will be forced to migrate. But not now. We cannot afford the disruption and the budget. We will investigate and keep up to date.”

No, not everyone on the 3000 is in the form of some migration status. Everyone in the 3000 community still running the system is keen to keep some 3000 expertise on the payroll or on call. And they will all need upgrades, eventually, if their business is growing.

HP revenue growth shatters quarterly marks

HP on Nov. 19 posted results from its latest quarter which broke its single-quarter revenue numbers by nearly 30 percent. HP promoted the push as led by the software gains in the company's operations, according to CEO Mark Hurd. A $28 billion finish in the final 90 days of sales for the the year gave HP a total of $105 billion for its annual sales. Q4 netted $2.6 billion in profits. Year-long profits for 2007 were $7.2 billion.

“Strong performance across our businesses was highlighted by sharp improvement in our software segment,” said Hurd. Overall, he noted, “We have added over $12 billion of new revenue this year. While we still have more work to do, HP is well positioned to make further progress in the marketplace.”

In comparison, Apple's last four quarters netted $3.5 billion in profit on one fourth of HP's revenues. IBM has posted $12 billion in profit over its last four quarters on $118 billion in revenues.

HP also announced that its board approved the repurchase of $8 billion in its common stock. This would represent about six percent of all outstanding HP shares. HP started the trading day at a price of $50.87 per share, about three dollars off its 52-week high.

Highlights from the report, released after the markets closed, showed that the Enterprise Systems and Storage Group, (ESS), the parent group where the HP 3000 alternative systems such as Integrity and NonStop servers are created and sold, posted a 10 percent revenue growth over last year's Q4.

The Business Critical Systems group, heartland of the Integrity alternative, increased revenues by 5 percent in the final period of fiscal 2007. Integrity sales grew 59 percent in the quarter, but HP lost ground in the PA-RISC and Alpha sectors, places where the vendor has already promised an end to the server lines built upon those chipsets.

BCS profits rose over last year's Q4 to $693 million, 13.5 percent of revenues. But industry-standard server sales dominated the ESS increases for the quarter. Overall these Intel-based systems sold 14 percent more than in last year's Q4, sparked by x86 (Xeon) blade revenue increases of 78 percent.

However, BCS numbers paled when compared to the HP Services operations, where the vast majority of HP 3000 customers still do business with Hewlett-Packard. HP Services grew to $16.4 billion on the year, an uptick from the 2006 results of  $15,6 billion. Services covers nearly every HP product line, but the BCS yearly revenues fell for 2007, down from $3.6 billion to $3.5 billion.

The HP Software operations, a nexus of acquistions over the prior year and half, doubled its revenues over the prior-year period to $698 million, led by growth from the businesses acquired in HP’s purchase of Mercury Interactive. HP said that on a year-over-year basis, HP OpenView grew 24 percent excluding Mercury. Operating profit was $177 million, or 25.4 percent of revenues, up from $60 million, or 17.2 percent of revenue, in the prior-year period.

Printers and Imaging surrendered its largest share ranking among HP's businesses, with HP's Personal Systems Group taking the  lead in revenues.  Operating profits in the printer group were flat compared to last year's Q4, but still contributed a hearty $1.1 billion to the quarter's profits, about 40 percent of the quarterly total.

Some reports showed that HP increased its sales of PCs in China during the period to lift up the Personal Systems Group numbers.

Community Meet's network links full house

They came on a soccer day, kids's sports day, a morning for extra sleep. The Saturday of the first e3000 Community Meet dawned with a filled room of the  who’s who of the 3000 community. Or, as QSS application founder Duane Percox joked, “who’s left.”

Who was left had lots to share and report. At left, Rick Gilligan (standing) of bank app vendor CASE shared his MicroFocus COBOL experiences with Bob Cavanagh of Acucorp, now part of MicroFocus

The meeting reached its 50 attendee target, a larger share of partners and consultants than customers. But for each seat of the 50 which were filled at the Doubletree Hotel on San Francisco’s bayshore, a few, a dozen or a hundred other HP 3000 customers were represented. The nine hours of networking, counting breakfast, lunch and the after-meeting supper, offered a view of the future with several destinations — and no certain end of life.

HP was well represented at the meeting, a full table of engineers, managers and experts sitting on the front row. Jennie Hou, HP’s e3000 business manager, updated the crowd on the vendor’s new offerings during 2007, a talk she delivered to far fewer 3000 community members during the summer's HP Technology Forum. Of course, back then, HP's limit to its 3000 business was the end of 2008, not 2010.

The brightest sparkplug of the meeting, ScreenJet's Alan Yeo, (second from left, along with Transact creator David Dummer, Eloquence's Michael Marxmeier and Cavanagh) concluded the meeting with an insight. "I've often wondered why HP placed the e in front of 3000," he said. "Now I think I know. It stands for enduring, because the 3000 has lasted a darn sight longer than HP expected."

HP's contribution to the day was hard to overlook. For all of its IO expert firepower, community liaison connection and even Ross McDonald's lab director oversight, the most moving expression of the day from HP came through a former employee who kicked off the meeting. Jeff Vance had lived in the HP mountaintop, and literally worked from there in his most lauded and productive years developing from home, before retiring in May.

Just six months after his HP exit Vance stood before us to testify about how alive the future feels for him, all while a collage of 3000 division team members flashed on the screen behind Vance. The photos celebrated the retired and departed while making a case for how the end of life of work cannot be calculated when you love what you do.

Lunch delivered the biggest torrent of networking, the brightest benefit which attendees could carry away from a surrended Saturday. A room buzzed with revivals and reports. Some of the brightest lights in the community exchanged updates of the future outside of the 3000 extension, as well as the personal reports on migration tricks that make networking such a solid extension of online relationships.

A surprising amount of the day’s talk mapped paths and options for homesteading. Maybe not a surprise, considering that half of the community's customers are still using HP 3000s, even while some are prodding along migration projects. Gavin Scott of Allegro Consultants, and Stan Sieler after him, identified a short range of risks in remaining on the platform. (Below, Speedware's Chris Koppe looks on as Sieler, the latest e3000 Contributor of the Year, explains how customers can avoid "Planning for Failure.")

Most likely among the homesteading risks, Sieler said, was that an MPE/iX vendor would go out of business unexpectedly. The irony of knowing that HP has been going out of its 3000 business, ever so slowly and carefully, but at first unexpectedly — well, that wasn’t lost on me.

New ideas and updates on migration news arrived in crisp 20-minute talks. Each presenter seemed to understand that to run overtime would be denying the crowd a chance to hear more on a different solution, whether it was the emerging IT tool of Application Portfolio Management, explained and outlined by Birket Foster, or the advances in migration techniques and strategies, detailed by Chris Koppe.

Very little of the day would have been possible without the generous sponsorship of companies like Foster's and Koppe's. The registration Web site was popped together, over a matter of days and including online payment options, by Speedware's Marketing Manager Dani Knezevic, who was on hand at the registration table to sign us in and distribute badges. Some attendees paid on the morning of the Meet. Other sponsors to help make the Meet happen:  Yeo's ScreenJet, and Eloquence creator Marxmeier Software AG, as well as Micro Focus, now the focal point for migration-bound COBOL solutions.

Absent from the room? The veiled dismay and outright anger at the vendor which sparked all this transition. The OpenMPE advisory sounded upbeat and hopeful, as well as full of new opportunities to network. Best wishes got passed along to the GHRUG user group conference, still scheduled for March 14-15 in Houston's suburbs. Birket Foster and Matt Perdue drove through the slides that continue to make a case for an independent lab to on the MPE/iX source code, once HP is ready to transfer the software for patching. As we have said before, HP'S Service and Support sector has more to say about the licensing timetable than any other portion of HP.

News came in modest amounts, like the explanation of COBOL enhancements to AcuCOBOL, offered by Acucorp whic now a part of longtime COBOL rival Micro Focus. Both companies sent representatives to the meet. While AcuCOBOL’s manager Bob Cavanagh fielded some pointed questions about licensing changes once the two companies merge to a single product, the intent of the answers seemed clear: the combined firms want to do what’s needed to speed and clear the path of migration of all those COBOL apps you run on 3000s today.