3000 NewsWire

Which HP world looks more real?

After a week spent at the HP Technology Forum, I found my way back to the NewsWire office, but I haven't been able to pinpoint the definitive location of your community. Is the experience all about expanding technical choice and excising the old systems? It certainly seemed that way in Las Vegas at the Forum, right from the start of the experience when the attendees were handed a 3-pound, wire-bound program to haul back to their hotel rooms. The book was crammed with more than a thousand sessions, keynotes, and hands-on labs, a tome festooned with tabs.

The assembly was so large it took three floors of the Mandalay Bay Convention center to contain it all. A 20-minute walk between two session rooms was not difficult to engineer. Over a day or so, I learned the shortcuts and elevator outlets, as well as where the comfy chairs and quiet, wi-fi-enabled salons were located.

This was a conference devoted to HP's enterprise computer offerings, including the vendor's storage systems. The show floor was broad enough to offer both an HP Store (complete with branded clothing and HP-logoed Leatherman tools) and a trick-shot pool artist playing one customer after another (all men, as you can see why at left) at the QLogix booth. Why not? Just a few years ago, when Interex hosted an HP World, Danica Patrick of race-car fame was the beautiful attraction at the Logical booth.

The conference was so jammed with ideas, new solutions and HP employees that I could believe this vision was the only possible one for a user of HP-built computers. Tromp those three floors, wander that expo hall with foosball table and a DriveSavers booth where disks were being destroyed for entertainment, and the vision of the HP 3000 faded quickly. I could believe the migration expert who said to me, one month before the conference

An IT director or CIO that does not have an active plan to migrate or terminate the HP 3000 applications is doing his company a disservice. I cannot believe that such a thing exists, it's unthinkable, but I'm sure it does exist.

And yet, sensible and responsible IT pros rely on the HP 3000 today. Some of the servers work inside HP's own IT operations, and yes, those do have active termination plans. It's the length of those plans that calls the other HP computer vision to mind, a location without trick shots, three pounds of sessions or the change which HP promotes to aid quick changes in an enterprise computer environment. How much change does a company need to observe and learn about?

For this other world of the HP enterprise customer, few pictures or three-color maps are needed. Instead of reaching for the novel innovation, the talent in the homesteader's world is learning to focus, like an elder whose heartbeat has become books instead of the 500 changing channels of TV. (For the record, I saw no displays promoting HP flat-screen TVs at the expo.)

Instead, the homesteader gives good reasons why the unthinkable is thinkable. "With 11 locations around the world," says ISIT Director Terry Simpkins of Measurement Specialties, "we have a substantial investment in the 3000's continued operation. At this time we have no plans to leave the HP 3000 platform."

"We are actively installing SAP," says Zelik Schwartzman of Estee Lauder Companies. "However as far as the HP 3000 is concerned, we anticipate this system will be around for many many years to come, as we use it as our MRP engine.

Valley Presbyterian Hospital has migrated away to another hospital information system. But they are doing the unthinkable and homesteading their 3000, too. "It doesn't look like the HP 3000 will be going away," says senior programmer/analyst Catherine Litten. "It has become our data repository for historical reporting. Nothing new going on, just lots of reports and data extracts."

General Manager Gary Shumm at IRA backoffice management firm IER says "we will be upgrading some hardware this year to continue its use." A consultant says his largest client operates more than 30 HP 3000s and will do so until at least 2011. "They are hard at work trying to complete their migration," says Mark Ranft. "The time and effort required to migrate will continue. After that the systems will remain for historical purposes."

More than 30 HP 3000s, most of the latest generation? Healthcare-critical customers making crucial use of MPE/iX systems? Ordering new hardware for a server that lose its HP lab support for in six months? A company with 11 locations using the 3000 with no plans to migrate? These scenes do match the HP enterprise vision I observed, recorded, and photographed in Las Vegas at the Technology Forum.

In the US over the past six years, just about the same time as the post 9/11 era, we're heard of a Red State vs. Blue State mentality. Diametrically opposed in vision, we have been told. But lately in my country we are hearing a message that we have more in common than we have in difference. Things don't look the same in Lawrence, Kansas as in Las Vegas — but there is an HP liaison to the homestead community in one town, while the other hosted the expertise to configure new blade server replacements (at left) at a conference in the other.

Nothing is unthinkable, however unfamiliar it may seem. I walked down to the expo floor in the waning hours of my Tech Forum visit and tried to explain that the HP 3000 community would be slower to adopt blades, new environments, and asked what steps the vendor could offer to ease the transition to the three-ring, wire-bound carnival of change. The HP employee at the booth struggled to understand that staying with older hardware could be responsible, not radical or reckless.

It's easy enough to acquire the need for the new. A movie about a beloved robot opened this weekend, and the discarded world in WALL-E was entertaining and inspirational. Tossing things away should be a considered action, one where re-use and renewal are options. Hey, HP even has an Alpha ReNew program now, one where you can purchase Alpha enterprise servers from the vendor for use in the VMS environment.

Another animated gem of a movie, Robots, lured its populace with the slogan, "Why be you, when you can be new!" You can be both. You can be an HP computer user whether Las Vegas or Lawrence seems more like home. With some skilled choices, you can find value in both forums for years to come.

A drive to beat the clock

OpenMPE is waiting to hear from the vendor about participating in a project to test-run the creation of a "build" of MPE/iX. In the meantime, the advocacy group has raised the flag on its future a little higher.

Director Matt Perdue sent us a note that reports that "The domain name openmpe.org has been renewed for five years. It will next expire on 9-13-2013, perhaps outlasting HP's involvement with MPE. That is of course if HP doesn't extend 'mature product support without sustaining engineering' beyond 2010."

The report arrived as an e-mail, but I detected a tone of persistent pleasure in Perdue's sign-off. There's a Web page that will tell you how many days of HP's 3000 support, with sustained (patch) engineering, the community has left.

For the customers who remain on the HP 3000 only so long as the vendor supplies support, we remind you that only six months remain of HP labs support for the system. Beyond December 31 of this year, it's workarounds "for the lot of ye," (as they said in The Meaning of Life) because the vendor has said "We lose our labs" starting in 2009. If you can arrange something better with HP on your own, good for you — but HP is making no promises for 2009.

For those who'd like to calculate the number of days until the only MPE/iX labs will be operated at third party sites — and OpenMPE has been persistent in its goal to become one — take a trip to timeanddate.com/counters/customcount.html and punch in 1-1-2009. You can calculate the time left on HP's 3000 business operations by  typing in 1-1-2011.

Purdue offered a simple vow, one that a homesteading HP 3000 customer may count upon until a transition plan emerges for everybody. Transition for a homesteader can mean getting onto a new computer platform at a more reasonable cost or lower risk, or getting established with a new ecosystem (and third party labs/support) to remain an MPE/iX user.

Whatever the outcome for the customer who is homesteading now, and for the near future, they might be heartened to hear Purdue say, as he did, "Yes, HP, we intend on outlasting you."

A way to report screw-ups

When a session program aborts on the HP 3000, the users don't tell us. Is there a mechanism to report user screw ups?

Matt Perdue of the OpenMPE board and Hill Country Technologies replies:

At one of my clients' sites, all online programs (defined as used by anyone acting interactively with the application) have been coded to go to a common abort procedure when IMAGE, VPlus or other file errors cause the program to want to abort, at least somewhat gracefully. That section closes the terminal, calls DBEXPLAIN or prints some kind of status message and sends this information and what section caused the abort to the console. Each section of code starts with a line such as MOVE “6004-DELETE” TO ABORT-SECTION.

Of course there is the random, unprogrammed-for abort. Not much can be done about that, except write a transaction log record to a file or dataset so you can track the exact progress and last point a user was in before the abort.

I also have a mechanism to control users logging off gracefully for backups. All just part of learning and developing ways to manage remote users since 1985! And it makes my life easier in the process.

Each screen times out at five minutes, taking the user back to the previous screen or menu. When the main menu is reached, the program checks the setting of a log off control record and if set to “Y” the program will log off, very gracefully. I have another program that runs 20 minutes prior to the backups, setting the control to “Y”.

With users scattered at dozens of locations in different cities this is the only way to painfully insure everybody is logged off for the backups. It’s automatic. Another program runs in a series of jobs after the backup that sets the control to “N” so the users can log on and stay logged on.

One application has users performing critical update tasks at various times, though not an IMAGE “critical update” for search key items. These critical updates involve changes to multiple datasets and if I need to force a user to be logged off I don’t want to do that in the middle of a critical update the user may be performing. DBBEGIN and DBEND don’t help any in this case as an ABORTJOB #Snnn will complete an individual database call, but not take into account the DBEND hasn’t been reached.

The solution is to have the program at the start of a critical update write a record to a dataset indicating the user info (LDEV, date, time, program section, “critical update”) and to clear this record when the update is completed. A management screen is programmed to check this dataset and display the status of each user by LDEV and I can instantly see who is in critical update and who is not.

I also use this function to have at the start of each screen a user goes into write a dataset record indicating what screen they are in (LDEV, date, time, screen name, other related data). My monitor screen tells me what screen each user is in at any time and if they’re in a critical update. This works great at one site to see if anyone still logged on after 5 PM is really doing any work — if not, I set the log off flag to “Y” so they get logged off after 5-10 minutes. The log off flag is set to “Y” or “N” by the push of a function key in the management screen — easy!

Blades on parade

One of the big advantages of conference-style learning is the ability to see, touch and ask questions interactively. Like, "How do these blade servers look and work, anyway?"

That's the question I asked HP at the latest Technology Forum. A movie of a couple of minutes gives a rundown on HP's latest blade servers, as well as a tour at the C7000 enclosure the blades need to operate. Have a look at the two minute blade demo movie from the HP booth on the Expo floor.

The cinematography on this movie won't rival The Fall, (excellent film, that one; go see it soon on the big screen.). Unlike The Fall, which will have a really brief run in theatres, blades are going to be playing for a long time at HP. Your vendor hopes they will play a part in your transition away from the HP 3000 hardware.

In the old days, HP 3000 sites would call these racked servers. But they were a lot heavier, larger, noisier and hotter, and oh yeah, they drew more power. HP actually called servers built on the PCI and PA-RISC hardware "hot servers" when I spoke to the vendor at the conference.

Nothing's perfect about any solution, of course. The blade servers only use the Intel chipset — that is, the Xeon-like successor to the x86 "Wintel" line, or the Itanium chips, also available in your vendor's Integrity business server line. And neither of these chips will run MPE/iX. Not yet, to be accurate — because the emulator projects for HP 3000 hardware could, within several years, shave down the size of an HP 3000 to the size of one of these blades.

There's a lot of engineering and testing to be done to call blades a homestead option yet. Today, they represent a new server form factor that HP is using to cut a bigger share of the server market.

Critical mass makes CEO access

HP celebrated the 30th birthday of VMS at this month's Tech Forum, marking the end of a third decade of service of the operating system that has bulwarked the user group now known as Connect. Before there was Connect there was Encompass for HP enterprise system users, and before that the DECUS user group represented customers to the vendor. The oldest operating system still sold by HP makes the backbone of the vendor's largest user group.

This year's meeting must have been especially satisfying to Nina Buik, president and leader of the new Connect group, as she lavished praise on the new allied group's members during Connect's coming out party at The House of Blues. "There," I said to Transoft's Rene Nunnington "is a person who was born to be a user group president."

After passing out awards and thanks for the many volunteers who give a user community backbone, Buik beamed during a short chat while she related her news of the day: HP CEO Mark Hurd gave her a 20-minute meeting at the conference, their first together.

With appropriate pride, Buik showed me her cell phone photo of her and Hurd together. I asked what he was like one-on-one, and she reported that he's all he appears to be onstage and in public. "And he expressed his strong support for the user group," she added.

The CEO of the world's largest computer firm can carry that kind of celebrity clout, impressing those whose job is to impress the opinions and decisions of HP's executives.

Such support is more important than ever for an organization that realizes its chief benefit is a link to HP's chief executives. With the alliance of three user groups into the single Connect, the entity "now has the critical mass" to earn more attention from HP than they might have had as individual user groups.

Critical mass is an important element in HP's valuation of its enterprise products. VMS achieved the critical mass which MPE didn't, even though the 3000's operating environment sold more than 80,000 systems in its HP lifetime. Once Hurd's predecessor, Carly Fiorina, looked over the enterprise assets of a merged company during 2001, the 400,000-plus customers using OpenVMS looked more critical to HP's business plans.

Of course, Fiorina wrote her own message of praise in support of the Interex user group, a document so widely distributed that it was still on the Greater Houston RUG Web site within the past year — years after both Interex and Fiorina left the HP stage. Connect will be doing its work in a different era and with a different style in the coming year. And just like OpenVMS, with a lot more critical mass.

One final Forum bow?

I wondered, while en route to the latest HP Technology Forum, which of these annual user meetings would offer HP's last e3000 update. Some signs from last week point to the 2008 edition as the last public event where HP will present news about the platform. This is, after all, the last year when the server will employ the services of HP's labs.

HP's Alvina Nishimoto, who's been leading the information parade for third party tools and migration success stories, gave an outstanding contributor award of sorts at the e3000 roadmap meeting. The award shown in the slide above had a commemorative tone about it, like a fond farewell to the days when something new was part of the HP message to 3000 attendees.

At the conference I learned that the Right to Use licenses have been more popular than HP first imagined. HP's 3000 work had to complete a lot of paperwork and presentations to get a licensing product onto the price list for 2007. "People have used systems, and they want to upgrade their license level on them," Nishimoto said.

So with just two HP speakers at the conference addressing the 3000 — Nishimoto and Jim Hawkins, the latter of whom spoke for five minutes at the end of the OpenMPE update — it seemed like those customers upgrading the used systems will outlast HP's MPE/iX participation in the Tech Forum. It's a great place to learn about technology that will never make it onto a 3000, but is readily available for HP's 3000 replacements.

I asked e3000 Business Manager Jennie Hou about HP's participation in the conference and what I should expect. The vendor has been stoic in its unchanging message during the past six months: migration is all HP will discuss now, since it's completing a PowerPatch (probably its last) and delivering some whitepapers to the community.

Hou said that I'd hear from HP when it's got more news to share with your community.

The e3000 community has always been and will continue to be an interesting place.  It truly is one of a kind. This year, at Alvina's talk, HP will thank every e3000 partner and customer. HP recognizes that the e3000 community wouldn't be what it is without so many people's ongoing involvement and contributions. This also includes all your dedication in bringing the e3000 news to the user community over the past decades.

All of you deserve kudos for choosing and defending and expanding the 3000 community through your contributions. We'll have to wait another year to see if HP's 3000 group can offer any additional presentations about the server.

Anniversaries all around

Lapels and shirts all around the HP Technology Forum sported a jaunty badge this week. HP, having purchased Digital through its Compaq acquisition, is celebrating the 30th anniversary of VMS. DEC users who have endured wrong-headed management and unlucky timing on technology innovations should be proud. They use one of the last vendor-built operating environments, an OS with acolytes so ardent they gather for a Boot Camp each year in Nashua, New Hampshire.

Of course, the badges recalled the many pins HP 3000 customers wore with pride in the waning days of HP's 3000 business. Hewlett-Packard did not celebrate the 35th anniversary of MPE this year, even though the company uses the OS in its corporate datacenters to this very day.

This week's conference showed a lot of historical pros on display among much younger colleagues. Patrick Thibodeau called it the "salt and pepper crowd" in his story for Computerworld. You need salt and pepper to get to 30 and beyond. I genuinely wish more years to the VMS community. It perseveres on classic momentum, even while HP makes more noise about the IT strategies that do not revolve around operating environments.

And while the week celebrated something old, at least in IT timeframes, there was also a much younger anniversary. This 3000 NewsWire blog moved into its fourth years of service to our community and our committed sponsors. It's been a great thrill to be able to report within hours, like we did on Tuesday night, about 3000 news like the liberation of long-cloistered patches. The blog is a powerful tool for a journalist with loyal sources and a long memory. Thank you for your interest in our stories and inside information, data spinning ever farther from the home planet of HP.

At the Tech Forum we heard one VP anticipating another milestone, ready to celebrate the 25th anniversary of HP-UX. Putting HP-UX concerns up at the top of the keynote might have sent a mixed message about that history. HP was assuring the hundreds of thousands of UX users their environment isn't going extinct. As we noted earlier this week, Executive VP Ann Livermore reminded those salt and pepper folks that HP-UX still did $10 billion in business last year for HP.

But when technology climbs into the quarter-century and beyond demographic, it fights an uphill battle on a vendor's product line. These products fight to show growth, an attribute that a vendor desires far more than the customers of the product. There have been execeptions. IBM has made AS/400 and mainframe customers an indelible part of its computer legacy. Will HP do the same for HP-UX and for OpenVMS, or NonStop? The monetary momentum at HP is rolling away from vendor-built environments. Unlimited virtualization and its software gyrations, deep flanks of service experts, hardware built with industry standard components — all are ramping up much faster at HP than any of those environments which are old enough to celebrate.

Meanwhile, the chip architecture that started this revolution, x86, celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, too. HP still pays homage to the x86 designs in every Itanium processor it purchases from Intel. After all, the Itanium was built to float upon the vast sea of x86 code passed from DOS to Windows to XP to Vista.

The 25 anniversary of a mediocre design like x86 only proves that elegance and ardor are not the essential elements to longevity. Computing has been a business ever since it crawled out of university and government labs, and so what sells is what stays on to celebrate more anniversaries. Treasure and polish what you own, and care for its future. Only the community of an OS has the dedication to keep relighting the candles on the anniversary cakes.

Which HP blade will cut it for you?

HP's VP of marketing for Business Critical Systems said here at the Technology Forum that blade technology was the biggest message for critical systems users like you. The one printed press release I was given touted a new blade system for the Non-Stop operating environment. It's important to show that non-standard operating systems can be matched up with blade technology.

The headline read "HP introduces World's First Blade Server for 24/7 Mission-Critical Computing." You can be excused if you believe you already own Mission-Critical operating environment in MPE/iX.  Michelle Weiss even pointed out that some Non-Stop servers manage 911 systems. That's something the 3000 still does for some US entities, but that's not the point. Blades are an HP product you will only need if you're migrating.

Since many of you are doing that, a Blade 101 article seems in order. We'll soon be providing a better one that this introduction. HP's written a few, but the most important number is not 101, but 69. This is the share of the world's blade market which HP and outside analysts estimate that Hewlett-Packard holds today.

That's something just a bit less than Apple's hold on portable music players with its iPod. And HP seems to have the equivalent of the iPod of blade servers — so named because they are long and slim and so small they make disk drive enclosures seem bulky. Blades consume less power and can be managed from HP's "single pane of glass" interface.

Blades represent a solution where HP leads the field. But which patch of the field should the HP 3000 users who migrate consider as a new hardware platform? And which migrators can start farming out their 3000 computing onto blade servers today?

As it turns out, being able to virtualize an operating environment instance is a good measure of whether a blade will offer new opportunities to help offset its capital costs. In a 3000 update meeting on Tuesday, HP said that replacing a 3000 of A-Class or lower power was a good match for a blade. N-Class replacements are going to need a faster generation of processor to capture all the advantage of blade servers.

HP has been quick to remind us here that faster Itanium processors from Intel like Tukwila are only a matter of months away from getting to the vendors who build blades.

Blades support all five HP operating environments still on the "we'll sell you those" list: Windows, Linux, HP-UX, NonStop and OpenVMS. The blade servers support small to medium workloads individually, accept Integrity Virtual Machines, have moderate scalability requirements and moderate failover requirements.

Down in HP's booth in the Expo show floor, a senior product engineer showed me two enclosures in which to place your blade servers, the c3000 (coincidence, no?) and the c7000. It's a matter of how many blade systems you'll want to install and how much attached storage you will need, but the blades which you install in the c3000 enclosure can be moved to a c7000 if your needs grow.

HP made it easy to feel good about taking away more details on the products. In a clever use of green technology, HP placed laptops around its exhibit space to request product literature about the key solutions for mission-critical customers like you. Tick a box next to a product, fill in an e-mail address, and you get an HP e-mail with links that will drop datasheet and whitepaper PDF files onto your desktop. Save a tree.

HP got a glowing review of its blade solution with big mention of the power savings the solutions deliver. There's also a roundup of the blade server family, as well as a good primer on the why's of design of the blade server enclosures and why HP believes they're a good fit for a midsize company.

Whatever saves energy and space deserves a closer look in our world where energy and resource capacity are growing issues. Getting things smaller and cooler seems like a great idea this week, sitting in one of the largest resort complexes in the world with the highs outside nearing 110 degrees.

Press that's not completely approved

Running a user conference is no easy task, especially if your organization must partner with a powerful ally. There are many places where the gears can jam up on a machine that gathers thousands of people for four days of talk and learning.

But after 24 years of covering Hewlett-Packard user events, my experience with this sort of meeting has been changing — and I'm sorry to say, not entirely for the better. No, not crowded flights, 25 minutes to hail a cab, $12 burgers and so on. It's the restraints I feel tugged by HP. Years ago, editors and reporters were courted and curried at these events, meetings hosted and controlled by a users group, while the whole event was financed and supported by the computer vendor and its reseller partners.

Two events in the past two days suggest that those days of sway are long behind me and other editors. Yesterday morning I wanted to attend an OpenVMS roadmap breakout session. It was only an hour of the OpenVMS Security Product Manager talking about what's coming up for OpenVMS. (Luckier users, they are, than a customer who still must rely on the 3000.)

I was not so lucky getting into the doors of that breakout session.  A "temporary employee" waved written instructions that the press was not to be admitted to any breakout sessions. Also barred from entry at that moment: Patrick Thibodeau of Computerworld. I might understand why a specialized newsman like me wouldn't get access, but blocking Computerworld seemed like a mistake.

And it appeared to be an honest mixup, one which the PR agency rep Chase Skinner fixed with persistent talent. But we sped to a quick meeting with HP's manager of press relations for the event — who treated us media types to a fine dinner just the night before — to educate me on the nature of "roadmap" sessions. They sounded like they've become sorta, kinda, well, the type which HP isn't keen on letting anybody into except customers and partners.  Even though there's no confidential disclosure agreement (CDA) needed for anybody to pass into such a roadmap session. And believe me, there are plenty of CDA talks here where the "I promise not to tell" document is needed. The CDA is so ubiquitous that it's printed into the conference session guide, complete with signature line to fill in and submit.

Patrick and I got new badges rushed to us after we'd been escorted into the meeting. Our new papers were upgraded from a press pass that could not pass us into the hundreds of breakout sessions. Okay, a mixup, and an education for me about what a roadmap might mean now and in the future. Face it, HP: Roadmaps promise news, and that's what we get paid to write.

The education about my editor's access didn't stop at the revision of what a roadmap means, though.

After the OpenVMS roadmap, I was told in an editor's briefing that blade technology represents HP's biggest push into the enterprise server solution arena. So after a baffling blades talk where a customer finally asked "Are you going to talk about blades?" I went down to the HP booth to push through the throngs to find out more. I got just what I wanted to hear in just a few minutes, but was I got was also trouble as far as HP was concerned. My Senior Product Manager interview subject, who was standing at the booth, was told by a cohort "you're not press-approved."

Two days of this special handling from HP are making me feel like the vendor's information control has been dialed up to a level as uncomfortable as the heat outside.

I've got nearly a quarter-century of making a career at these meetings, always with the assignment of writing stories to report customer views and HP's messages about new products. But this has been one year I'd mark among the hardest of those 24, right alongside the time an Interex user group employee tried to bar me from the HP 3000 management roundtable.

This work out here in the desert and in steamy places like Houston is hard enough without changing the rules and building new barricades to communication. Confusing, restrictive access run by "temporary employees" — who need to walkie-talkie to yet another company (not HP, or a PR firm) to allow editors inside of meetings, places where we might hear customers talking out loud — well, it all smacks of a lot of unnecessary control. The roadmaps are presentations where HP future plans are discussed. They have been so for many years, and every slide in them has a stock footnote of "Plans are subject to change." The strategy of putting HP employees "not approved for the press" onto the show floor just doesn't befit a company of HP's history and stature in the industry. What can there be to approve, steer or shape about which blade server enclosure is the right choice for an HP 3000 migrating customer? Can HP really need to control what we hear about how concerned OpenVMS customers might be this year about their roadmap?

I can use what I learned in my floor briefing on blades with my "not approved for press" senior product manager, but because I don't want to get him in trouble, his name won't appear. But why the trouble, the alarmed management? Six years ago, when HP and Compaq first came together and Interex ran a shared user event with lots of confusion, somebody at a door wanted to keep me from reporting by invoking a rule that HP insisted upon, a new snag in my long-worn fabric of industry-to-press communication. Back in 2002 I asked in a NewsWire headline, "What's there to hide?"

I truly want to know the answer to that question, even if it means these events are no longer useful to our readers like they were in the past. As I've said more than once this year, you won't get far with a professional journalist by telling them they cannot have access to a source. I don't want it to be true that these user conference events, which have now content jointly managed by the vendor and the user group, have now become a controlled showcase for HP's polished product and strategy message. I am looking for another reason to explain the roadmap redefinition and show floor incidents of this week. "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by error," I remind myself. But if the Tech Forum is more useful to HP as a means to teach and train and test its partners, and influence customers in person, why not just say so?

We editors have been invited, most respectfully, to these events to help HP influence customers. In fact, I had a delightful interview with VP Lynn Anderson, an HP veteran since 1983  who started with COBOL and RPG on a 3000) whose title is "TSG Influencer Marketing." I'm an influencer, apparently, something that made us both giggle.

In a couple more hours I'll be back down on that show floor, invited as a guest of the new Connect user group for a reception, with all HP product engineers on hand. Since the press room is empty right now, I may have trouble getting a list of who is among the "press approved" HP staff I can interview. That might make for some trouble for me. But it will feel less troubling than the impression that the world's Number One vendor tightens the leash on editors who ask what's happening.

It's too early to draw conclusions for the future of user conferences, but I carry the hope that next year's press credentials will include access to all the non-confidential meetings, along with the ability to talk to anybody on an expo floor wearing an HP badge. That last one is most important to HP's stature. I'm old enough to remember a Hewlett-Packard founded by two fellows who would encourage that professional courtesy — especially at a meeting which bears the company's name.

A few other HP notes of 3000 news

HP shared three other pieces of news in its Tuesday briefings at the HP Technology Forum. The set of slides presented by HP vCSY staffer Alvina Nishimoto showed no changes from the slides shown in May for HP EMEA partners and customers.

But in less than 10 minutes at nearly 6 PM Tuesday, HP's Jim Hawkins shared three bits of news from the HP division about the 3000.

1. Cost of the RTU licenses is coming down, expecially on the high end server Right to Use licenses. HP has been selling RTUs for the customer who is upgrading an HP 3000 — instead of migrating, or as an interim step toward moving off a 3000. How many RTUs HP's selling is not known, of course, but it appears that the RTU is generating more revenues than HP R&D Lab Manager Ross McDonald predicted last year at RTU introduction. HP is looking at 35 to 50 percent reductions in the RTU fees.

2, As mentioned yesterday, HP will be shipping out its PowerPatch 5 for MPE/iX in August. HP's support chief Bernard Determe — who was listed for the first time yesterday as a customer contact for the 3000 community — within the remains of the lab services available to HP's 3000 operations. The support chief said that the 3000 support arm "will be losing its lab" 27 weeks from now.

3. Maybe most important to the long-term use of the HP 3000, HP's problem resolution database will be available on HP servers after 2010, when HP plans to exit the 3000 community.

Hawkins said that HP's servers will continue to host the information on solutions to HP 3000 problems — usually references to HP MPE/iX patches — until at least 2015.

"We won't be wiping off those disks just because they have MPE information on them," Hawkins said.

Since HP won't be selling support in 2011, it's possible those knowledge base reports — called Service Requests (SRs), among other names inside HP — will be available to the HP 3000 community in total, not just HP support customers. After all, in January of 2011, HP won't have anything to sell a 3000 site other than upgrade licenses, license transfers at $400 each, and whatever under-wraps support the vendor might sell.