3000 NewsWire

HP to curtail Software Update Services

As part of its November advisory to the community, Hewlett-Packard announced that it's ending its Software Update Services program for MPE/iX core software and subsystems. Starting January 1, 2009, these materials will only be available through HP Support resources.

Patches will still be available to the 3000 community via the IT Response Center mechanism working today. HP says the General Release patches will be available through Dec. 31, 2015.

The HP 3000 group at Hewlett-Packard had been supplying engineering for PowerPatch updates, the 3000 operating system tapes and other software materials to HP's support customers. Next year that work shifts entirely to the company's support operations. HP warned customers that delivery times may be extended as a result of the shift.

"People who have a support contract with us today should be contacting HP now to get updated media, versus later," said e3000 business manager Jennie Hou. "In 2009 there will be a different process to do that. It will be easier to use the existing process if they need to get additional software media."

We are saying to the supported customers that if you want to order your updated media (7.5, PowerPatches, etc.) to which you are entitled through the Software Update Services (SUS), we recommend you place the order now.  You can still get them post-2008, it's just that the delivery time will vary, as the Software Update Manager (SUM) will no longer be available on the ITRC. For the other customers not signed up for SUM entitlement, the ordering process will remain the same

Give thanks for each other

In a year that is marked by the loss of HP's labs, the 3000 community can give thanks for the resources which remain. Community members can be thankful for one another, the ability to connect with experts, and the continued efforts of OpenMPE and advisors trusted to empower transitions.

HP's announcement of a licensing program for read-only source code might spark some gratitude as well. The level of thanks at the moment hovers around hope, since no deals have been struck yet or code distributed. The vendor is opening up its intellectual property to possible license. The magnitude of the offer will be determined next year, but it's a start.

The generosity that you can count on today, this week, and this year flows from your community. This collective of wise, patient and seasoned individuals and companies supplies real value to your 3000 experience. An independent support team, or the honed skills of a migration services provider, or the resolute business plan of a software vendor which still offers maintenance contracts: This is what you can give thanks for today, this day when the US celebrates Thanksgiving.

You can ensure there's just as much to be thankful for next year, too. As of today, there's one under-thanked organization which has earned more respect. HP told its customers that OpenMPE played a vital part in the plan to release MPE/iX source code as reference material. HP's e3000 lab director Ross McDonald said that "We also want to take this opportunity to again recognize the OpenMPE Board for their continued advocacy on behalf of the HP e3000 customers who are continuing to use their systems through this end-of-life period."

OpenMPE is built of volunteers, but the organization will need to make ends meet soon if it's to continue to do the work it has accomplished up to now, plus shoulder the loss of HP assets like Invent3k and Jazz.

User groups and charities talk of volunteering, but a community needs unselfish support to maintain its vitality. HP is leaving the software business for 3000s this year, opening a spot for others to contribute. While nobody will be able to collect the same kinds of fees for products or programs, the accolades will be no lower.

Perhaps HP's source code plan will spark some business for a support company or a software vendor. If it does, then the Hewlett-Packard view toward your future will yield good will. In the meantime there's a lot of 3000 code in beta test patches that HP support customers could test on crash and burn systems. Such 3000 hardware has become cheaper to purchase than to ship — and the testing could liberate some MPE/iX patches. Count on each other, as you have for so many seasons in the past, during this season of hope and gratitude.

HP's Jazz lab server plays final notes

Launched in an era when the Internet was new, HP's Jazz lab server for HP 3000 training, technique and tools will go dark on December 31. Third party resources are rising up to replace the hosting point, but HP's has ended its contributed software efforts, the MPE/iX programs which will not find a new home inside HP.

Jazz was named after Jeri Ann Smith, an HP engineer whose contributions and enthusiasm for network tools supplied a spark to the 3000's nascent offerings. By the late 1990s, "It will be up on Jazz" had become a common refrain from HP software engineers when they reported on the location of new tools and technical papers. HP reported yesterday that the documents will be re-hosted on other HP support systems. But the downloadable programs — more than 80 projects created by HP as supported software, or by community members in volunteer efforts — must find a new home by year's end.

HP said that Jazz is going dark because its 3000 labs will end operations on Dec. 31. Since the server is maintained by HP's lab staff, halting the lab's engineering means unplugging the Series 900 HP 3000 which has been running for 12 years. Bootstrap development fundamentals such as the GNU Tools, the open source gcc compiler and utilities ported by independent developer Mark Klein, have had a home on Jazz for a decade. More than 80 other programs are hosted on the server, some with HP support and others ported and created by HP but unsupported.

Fortunately for the 3000 community, OpenMPE is already working on a new home for the treasures on Jazz.

HP reports that the staff-written technical white papers and presentation slide sets hosted on Jazz will be available in the vendor's support system after Dec. 31, although pointers to the new locations have not yet been revealed to the community. HP stressed that 3000 customers should begin downloading what they need from Jazz today.

"Most of the content will be preserved," said HP's Bill Cadier, an HP 3000 engineer who's been managing the server's contents. "After the end of the year Jazz will go away, and some content will remain on other HP internal servers. We're also exploring third parties picking up ownership of the Jazz role."

OpenMPE can make that exploration a quick expedition. "OpenMPE is in the process of making Jazz's contents available on our new server," said OpenMPE director Donna Hoffmeister. The advocacy group is already taking on the duties of hosting a public access development server, the former Invent3k project which is closing up at HP this Sunday night.

HP cannot move the downloadable programs "onto the ITRC servers, nor to doc.hp.com," Cadier said.

"Anything that people will need they should download before Dec. 31, 2008," said business manager Jennie Hou. "That's our recommendation."

A brief list of some of the programs available for downloading from Jazz:

Open source software produced/ported and "supported" by HP:
• Apache
• BIND
• Many command files
• dnscheck
• Porting Scanner
• Porting Wrappers
• Samba
• The System Inventory Utility
• Syslog
• WebWise

Open source software produced/ported as unsupported freeware by HP:
• JServ
• NTP
• OpenSSL
• Perl
• Sendmail

Open source software produced/ported by individuals:

• Analog
• autoconf
• bash
• gdbm
• Glimpse
• ht://Dig
• mmencode/sendmime
• MPE::CIvar
• MPE::IMAGE
• NetPBM
• OpenLDAP
• Ploticus
• Python
• SAURCS
• SLS
• texinfo
• Tidy
• TIFF library
• wget

Binary-only software produced/ported and "supported" by HP:

• CRYPT
• DBUTIL
• Firmware
• Java
• LDAP
• LineJet Utilities
• Patch/iX
• VERSION
• VT3K

HP creates first MPE/iX source license

Tomorrow: More, on the closing of HP's Jazz lab server

Hewlett-Packard has reached into its recent past to develop a future tool for the 3000, a document to work after the company's end-game in 2010. The vendor still calls this period "end-of-life," but it is devising a means to assist 3000 survival after the vendor leaves the market. Many details of HP’s first third party license of MPE/iX remain under the wraps of what HP calls simple business ethics and commonplace confidentiality.

HP has turned to a resource which left the company, the retired HP engineer Mike Paivinen who heard OpenMPE requests from 2002 to 2007, to help shape this long-sought MPE code license. The license will cover "most of the core operating system, most of networking, and TurboIMAGE," according to Paivinen.

HP hired Paivinen at the end of this summer to work on the licensing project, bringing him back to the company as a contractor. What the vendor is creating will not give anyone enough license to build new versions of MPE/iX. Instead, a license for a read-only reference copy of the source will be available to some companies supporting 3000 users, as well as software suppliers. HP has not capped the number of licenses.

"There is no predefined number of licenses," said Jennie Hou, the e3000 business manager at HP. "We're trying to balance the need for HP e3000 customers to get technical support with the potential downside of having a large number of patch developers." HP didn't say why a large number of developers would be a downside. The company is licensing the use of the source as-is, with no support.

The source code is aimed at companies offering support or products related to the 3000. "The source code is going to be available as reference material for third parties whose business is providing technical support to HP customers," Paivinen said in a briefing. "The way we define technical support is investigating problems, developing workarounds and creating instruction-level binary patches that modify the object code."

A 3000 customer's status as an HP support customer has no bearing on anyone's suitability for a license, HP said.

The source code license is targeted at three types of third parties: 1. Those whose business model is to provide technical support on HP e3000 products; 2. Software providers whose products have an intimate knowledge  of MPE/iX internals, and 3. Software providers whose products emulate one or more aspects of MPE/iX and the HP 3000 on other HP products.

The license will not be sold as a typical HP product. "We're creating a limited number of fee-based licenses," Paivinen said. "This isn't something that's going onto the HP Corporate Price List, something anybody can get. It's a limited licensing arrangement between us and third parties. Therefore, it's not something that's going to be broadly available."

The license goes beyond the "intentions" that HP offered in statements of prior years. "This project is well underway," Hou said, "and we're working on making this possible. The details still need to be worked out, but we are moving forward. This licensing agreement will be made available."

But potential licensees are urged to move quickly. "The longer someone waits to express their interest, the less likely that they would become a licensee," Hou said.

HP will be looking for people who are likely to be capable and responsible licensees of the 3000, and have a track record with the 3000 community. "I don't think you could say that everybody who is supporting 3000 customers is necessarily going to be granted a license to the source code," Paivinen said.

Starting Jan. 1, 2011 - after HP ends the last of its 3000 support - outside vendors can start using source as reference to create patches which modify MPE/iX object code. As such, this license does not enable changes to the operating system source. "It's for use as reference material, that the key," Paivinen said.

HP would not identify, in a discussion with the NewsWire, which parts of the MPE/iX core and networking code will be omitted from the license. Paivinen confirmed that third party intellectual property rights are an issue in releasing some parts of MPE/iX. During user group discussions, members at all levels of the 3000 community identified MPE/iX's streaming module (written by Mentat) and the Posix interface (created for HP by MKS) as third-party portions of the OS.

While not naming these segments as specifically missing from the source license, Paivinen said "We have to honor the agreements with people who have licensed us source code."

HP would not identify what parts of the company will be involved in establishing licenses with third parties. Getting a license established with HP starts with a query. The e-mail requests, aimed at a new e3000.migration-center@hp.com address, will arrive in Hou's mailbox to start screening and negotiations. But HP would only say that the rest of the process "will begin on the back end."

HP said it expects OpenMPE to request to become a licensee, but the vendor will not comment on the suitability of any potential licensee. OpenMPE falls outside of both HP targets for a licensee as defined on the November Web page. OpenMPE does not supply either support or a software product for 3000 customers -- although the organization has an extensive, and some might say impressive, record with the community.

HP will not make information public on when the source licensing process will be finished, although it is considering how it might allow licensees to tell the community about their status with HP. "Internal workings like that are typically not something we talk to the press about," Paivinen said.

HP has started the process of accepting e-mail queries from interested third parties. HP said that the license terms are nearly complete. "The development of the license agreement is nearly complete and we are ready to begin reviewing requests from potential licensees as they come in," said Hou. The vendor says that the project is funded and staffed and moving.

The timing of the release of source - the start of 2011 - is later than some have requested. OpenMPE has been pushing for an immediate pass-off of MPE source, but HP's timeline will be farther into the future. The advocacy group has tried to ensure that when HP's lab services end next month, an alternative from OpenMPE would be available.

HP is more focused on doing what it can to prevent a gap in support, rather than MPE/iX development. "We're trying to make it work so that [the support] transition is as smooth as possible," Paivinen said. "Our intention is not that there be a gap between HP providing support, and third parties taking over that responsibility."

The license may help support companies and software suppliers to service clients "on what we call a binary patch level," Paivinen said. "They'll be using some sort of mechanism that directly edits binary object code, at an instruction-by-instruction level."

HP has not factored in any coordination requirement among licensees. For now, making patches consistent among the community's sites is up to the licensees.

"We won't be imposing any kind of organizational structure on the community in terms of how they choose to operate," Paivinen said. "We're going to be creating agreements between us and individual companies."

HP intends for the licenses to be uniform, however, at the onset of this process. Negotiations will be under Confidential Disclosure Agreements, a common HP condition for contact matters. HP would not promise that every agreement will be the same once negotiations conclude.

The vendor is now looking at the community-wide aspects of multiple licenses. "There's some questions that have come up recently about how people might choose to cooperate in the community once these licenses become effective," Paivinen said. "Some questions have been brought up that we hadn't originally thought of, that we need to go back and think about and try and understand."

HP is still "strongly recommending for people to transition off the 3000." HP's e3000 Web page will continue to provide information on transition services and materials.

HP touts Q4 figures in report

HP considered the last two months of its fourth quarter as a tough stretch of road. But today the vendor put a bright face on strong financials from that period, toting up record sales for Q4 as well as for for fiscal 2008. CEO Mark Hurd stressed ongoing cost cutting and confidence in the future. But HP's leader said the vendor had to do its work to make sure that Q4 would deliver extra profits as well as the sales increases buoyed by new acquistion EDS.

"These results demonstrate our ability to execute in a challenging market," Hurd said in a conference call and financials presentation with investment analysts. "Great companies excel in tough times, and in tough times customers turn to great companies. "I'm confident in HP's ability to gain share, expand earnings and emerge from the current environment as a stronger force in the marketplace."

While the HP services and support sector is expected to withstand the downturn in the economy, analysts show concern over the hardware-based parts of HP's business such as business servers. Figures from the report show Enterprise Storage and Servers, which delivers HP's 3000 alternatives such as Industry Standard Windows systems and the HP Unix Business Critical Server, saw revenues down 1 percent year to year. The Business Critical Servers revenue dropped 10 percent overall, while Integrity systems sales rose 6 percent.

Integrity now represents 83 percent of BCS revenues. HP blade server revenues, which includes some Integrity systems, rose 33 percent from the same period last year.

HP's services doubled revenues from the prior Q4, figures which in large measure were the result of adding EDS business. Meanwhile, Enterprise Storage and Servers saw its quarterly operating profits fall $31 million from the past year's final quarter. ESS was the only HP unit to show a decline in profits compared to Q4 of 2007.

But earnings per share overall for HP reached a record high at $1.03, when calculated outside of the Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (GAAP). Despite the falling profits at ESS, Hurd said that HP believes it held or gained share in each of its segments.

Hurd said he's confident of HP's financial position, in spite of what he called "macro-economic challenges," for reasons that include continued cost-cutting. "Our company is leaner, and more flexible than ever, and yet we still have more work to do [on cost structure], which is actually good news," he said. "We will be tightening discretionary spending given the environment."

HP also feels confident because one-third of its revenues and more than half of its profits come from "recurring sources such as services and supplies," Hurd said. While the company may be selling fewer systems in the year to come, support contracts for installed hardware look stable, and printers will always need ink and paper. HP is also running the company on 65 percent fewer applications, a simpler platform on which HP can innovate, Hurd said.

"This is a big deal for us. The market is getting tougher and less predictable. That said, an environment like this provides an opening for a company like HP to improve its competitive position. We have every intention of taking advantage of that opportunity." 

Now playing, our November print issue

Last night we posted the pages for our November printed NewsWire issue online. It's a 20MB PDF file, so it may take a little while to download. But the issue contains five articles which we have not yet posted to the blog, so you can read them in advance. We will have them up here over the next week or two.

And if you'd like your own mailed copy of the November issue, send an e-mail with a postal address.

Don't forget to check back here early tomorrow for breaking news about the HP advisory,  concerning the vendor's end-game issues around its 3000 operations post-2010. It's the second of three communiques on how HP means to resolve what it likes to call "end of life" issues.

We also expect to have a brief report later today -- within a few hours after the markets close -- on the full release of HP's Q4 financials.

OpenMPE approaches Invent3k services

As Hewlett-Packard prunes back its HP 3000 operations, opportunities are blooming. OpenMPE will be re-planting the Invent3k public access server, a resource that HP will turn off by month's end. The project will represent the first benefit the advocacy group offers which all 3000 owners can enjoy.

Donna Hoffmeister, an OpenMPE director and part of the technical support team at Allegro Consultants, explained that the organization will do more than HP was doing with Invent3k, a 3000 where programmers and developers have been creating software for any use, public or private, since the summer of 2001.

OpenMPE has additional plans for the Invent3k that include hosting Telamon’s freeware collection as well as the [free] Contributed Software Library software [formerly hosted at Interex]. We will be working with HP to retain both the gnu and perl development environments that exist on the current Invent3k system. The third-party software vendors are invited to have accounts on the new Invent3k server just as before.

Third parties hosted copies of their software, to support development projects, on the public server while it lived its life as a Series 989 3000 at HP. Mark Bixby, who was managing the server while he worked at HP, said interest was strong when the resource went online in 2001. "A lot of the long-time porters have signed up," he said then, "because it’s a lot bigger machine than we’ve had access to in the past. It helps experienced porters do their work faster. There’s also been quite a lot of sign-ups of people who just lurk on 3000-L. It’s nice to know that lurking community is eager to get involved."

OpenMPE is answering questions via e-mail about the new life for this community Web resource.

The server will be moving to Matt Purdue's Hill Country Technologies labs, where "the new invent3k system is a 2-way N4000 and will have over half a terabyte of storage attached," Hoffmeister said. Perdue, alson an OpenMPE director, "owns the  system but has generously told OpenMPE that we may use it." Perdue demonstrated his eye for value on the 3000 hardware line last summer, when he purchased one of the largest systems in the 9x7 line for under $300.

3000 community members who have accounts on Invent3k today should contact OpenMPE to make sure their work moves to the new home of the server. OpenMPE's goal is to replicate HP's Invent3k as much as possible," Hoffmeister said. "People with existing Invent3k accounts have been notified to contact OpenMPE if they're interested in migrating to the new system."   

HP has also gotten on board to help Invent3k start up in Perdue's lab. "HP has been very cooperative in this effort, Hoffmeister said. "They've given us commitments of time and human resources to help migrate from one system to the other. OpenMPE is grateful to HP for their help in this project."

HP sets work, reports schedule into 2009

HP has confirmed that its second advisory to the 3000 community will be posted next week. These reports will address issues about the vendor's end-game for active 3000 operations. Support continues through 2010, but the 3000 labs, as well as nearly all operations unrelated to support or migration advice, go dark next month.

What's more, the dimming of lights will begin early in December, pretty much on the Winter Solstice. By the darkest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, HP will be off for the year-end holidays, not to return until the week of Jan. 5. The company notified employees last week it would extend its normal week-long shutdown for the holiday to two weeks, to "achieve significant operational savings." Employees can either use vacation time or take the days unpaid, but the company will shut down for the back half of December.

The shutdown may be playing a role in the timetable for what HP's e3000 business manager Jennie Hou has called the final communique on 3000 matters other than support. Hou targeted January as the date for the third of three advisories about HP's disposition of post-2010 issues. MPE/iX source code licensing remains un-addressed.

The HP 3000 advisories are being posted on Hewlett-Packard's HP e3000 Web page, and the vendor has also been known to include an e-mail to 3000 newsgroup readers around the world when the news breaks.

Migrating 3000 users will also want to track this news, since HP's decisions about operations and intellectual property will have an impact on unfinished migration project time-lines. Interim homesteading, a step for many 3000 sites on the move, may be affected by HP's policies. Homesteaders, of course, will be most interest in any developments on HP's release or licensing of 3000 materials.

HP's told us we'll have a briefing soon on this month's advisory, so check back on here to see our review of what the vendor has decided, once the news goes public.

HP predicts stable '09 business

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

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

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

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

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

HP sees a first quarter with sales and profit numbers similar to Q4's, no small feat considering the swoon of sales across the board in worldwide businesses. Since the full Q4 report has been scheduled for about a week later than HP usually reports, the preliminary news was released in the usual week after mid-month of November.

In a swirl of Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (GAAP) and Earnings Per Share (EPS) figures, HP made a case for keeping its pace of revenues and earnings.

In providing its outlook for the first fiscal quarter and the full fiscal year 2009, the company has taken into consideration the current economic environment and the relative strength of the US dollar. Based on current currency exchange rates, the company now expects an unfavorable year-over-year currency impact on revenue of approximately 5 percentage points in the first quarter and roughly 6 - 7 percentage points for the full year and this impact is reflected in its outlook.

For the first fiscal quarter of 2009, HP expects revenue of approximately $32.0 billion to $32.5 billion, GAAP diluted EPS in the range of $0.80 to $0.82, and non-GAAP diluted EPS in the range of $0.93 to $0.95. Q109 non-GAAP diluted EPS estimates exclude after-tax costs of approximately $0.13 per share, related primarily to the amortization of purchased intangibles.

For the full fiscal year 2009, HP expects revenue of approximately $127.5 billion to $130.0 billion, GAAP diluted EPS in the range of $3.38 to $3.53, and non-GAAP diluted EPS in the range of $3.88 to $4.03. FY09 non-GAAP diluted EPS estimates exclude after-tax costs of approximately $0.50 per share, related primarily to the amortization of purchased intangibles.

HP will provide more detailed information about its fourth quarter and full year results in its previously scheduled Q408 earnings announcement and Webcast on Nov. 24. HP is providing this preliminary earnings information due to the current economic environment and its year-end earnings announcement being scheduled to occur later in the month relative to most quarters.

HP pulls Polymorphic Computing out of garage

By Birket Foster
Special to the NewsWire

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

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

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

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

There is no current billing standard for allowing a hosting company (ISP or RBOC or a Google) to charge for the individual utilities that complete the application environments. Not everything that will be required as a “completer app” will be done in “free” open source – there is still going to be a need for mashups and a way to pay the creators of the intellectual property. 

If HP could figure out how to do the billing system for micro-cents, and offer that back to the software vendor community, they could get the brightest and the best to flock to helping HP take a lead in the innovation of cloud computing. HP will get a piece of the action as they bill customers on behalf of the developers, the developers get a check —while the customer only has to deal with its cloud computing provider or application services provider who uses cloud computing. The strategy helps avoid licensing agreements and purchasing from lots of little vendors.

By the way, most of the really good innovation in software comes from small, high-performance teams. HP discovered that when the SAP/Oracle port to Itanium was completed. The top customers used about 150 applications to complete the environment – things like development and test solutions, along with deployment, operations and support software: things like spoolers, schedulers etc. Cloud computing needs a high-performing team at HP to step up and help produce a standard billing mechanism, one that will be the differentiator for the ISVs choosing to partner with HP. Then Polymorphic computing will be headed your way.