Who's to mind the CALENDAR?

Last year we took note of the HPCALENDAR intrinsic and its ability to create accurate timestamps for decades to come on the HP 3000. The intrinsic isn't new, though, even though HP advised its customers in November to begin using it on HP 3000s.

No, HPCALENDAR harks back to version 5.5 of MPE/iX. Its power lies in the 3000 for use by programmers who want accurate dates beyond 2038 for application files. But the operating system itself? It continues to use the old CALENDAR intrinsic, which only gives an accurate timestamp to 2027.

Is it foolish to be considering the timestamping ability of a 3000 some 19 years into the future? HP must have thought so while it made technical decisions for this system over the past seven years, knowing the vendor would step out of the 3000 community. You see, HPCALENDAR was never integrated into the operating system itself.

Now, with the 3000's development labs closed down, the community can wonder who'll keep the calendar functions up to date for MPE/iX.

Vesoft's Vladimir Volokh called to update us on the CALENDAR mistake, based on an error we made in our November printed issue. Although I carefully reproduced all of the HP technical details about using HPCALENDAR, a "display quote" on the page didn't get the facts correct"

The newer intrinsic extends the 3000's date accuracy for more than 30 years beyond 2008. 2038 will be the last year to accurately store timestamps.

Actually, it's Unix that's going to lose the ability to store timestamps accurately by 2038. Volokh explained that since HPCALENDAR uses 23 bits to store timestamps, there are 8.3 million places to store a date. If only HPCALENDAR had been wired into MPE/iX, instead of just available for application programmers to use as an intrinsic.

Top 2008 Stories: Homesteading

The year 2008 delivered changes and insights for the homesteading 3000 community, but it would be easy to label the top homesteading stories as those from HP's brain trust. We'll get to the HP top actions tomorrow, but the major stories for those staying with the 3000 revolve around independence, adoption and initiative. A computer that just completed 35 years of service requires no less.

1. On the task of adoption, as well as independence, OpenMPE took on the duties of software keeper for MPE/iX, housing the Contributed Software Library as well as the binary files for HP 3000 programs and utilities which HP created over the past 15 years. With HP closing its Jazz Web server dedicated to HP 3000 education, white papers and software, a new resource is available at openmpe.org.

2. HP 3000 conferences continued with MPE-specific content at the Greater Houston RUG in March and at the CAMUS ERP conference in August. While neither group has plans for a 2009 in-person event, these organizations showed that people will continue to travel to learn about 3000 administration and strategy, albeit in ever-decreasing numbers.

3. The community completed its fifth year of life since HP ceased building and selling the 3000. By this month, HP 3000 customers — still thousands of them — have spent more time creating an independent infrastructure than the years the community took to adopt Internet and open source tools before HP's Nov. 2001 exit announcement.

4. Small supporters continued to fill out the independent support network for 3000 hardware and software. One-person firms and companies with more than a dozen seasoned 3000 technical experts on hand now serve the majority of HP 3000 sites. From Pivital to Allegro to GSA and beyond, several dozen companies want to help extend the life of the durable server.

5. OpenMPE prodded HP into answers for the end-game operations from the vendor. The group elected new board members in the springtime and spent the fall getting HP to craft policy on how to transfer intellectual assets and essential processes. The final messages will show more work from the OpenMPE advocates, all volunteers who've worked for almost seven years to educate HP about how to leave a marketplace.

6. Technical discussions started among the community about emulation, ranging from ways to adopt non-HP-RISC processors for MPE to moving the operating system's strengths on top of other environments such as Linux. Emulation efforts such as these — which can use volunteers as well as benefit from OpenMPE organization — extend the utility, potential and lifespan for the HP 3000.

What the Community Is Doing Now

In less than one day from this morning, much of the world will close up its commercial concerns for a little while. Hanukkah is already upon us, and Christmas is tomorrow. Year-end in the IT business is a quiet time. But there's action in the advent to this period, if you look for it.

Hewlett-Packard has taken leave of action for these two weeks. The company has put on a salaries freeze as deep as anything now gripping North America's weather. The supplier of the alternative solutions for 3000 migrators will be shedding jobs as soon as 2009 begins.

"We believe it is prudent and responsible to reduce costs where possible," the company said in a statement this month. HP will reward "high performing" employees with compensation. The vendor reported record profits for its latest quarter, all while cooking up plans on how to pare down a workforce of more than 320,000. Even IBM's employee roster does not dwarf HP's today.

Employment is a 2009 issue for HP 3000 experts and veterans, too. Dale Pepoon lost his job at Circuit City tending HP 3000s last month. "I am open to contract or full time positions," he told us. "I am currently in transition. I have not been able to locate very many HP 3000 job listings, so I am trying to focus on my analysis and management skills when searching. It would be great to locate a company that is in transition to a new platform and needs the HP 3000 skills, but would be willing to train on the new technology or at least be willing to endure the learning curve."

There's hope for Dale. The largest migration services company in the community said that HP 3000 skills are even more important than experience in the target environment of a migration. He's also wise to emphasize the fundamental skills of managing enterprise IT. HP 3000 pros know much more than just the vitals of MPE/iX.

Circuit City has had its downturns along with the rest of the world's economy, the kind of setback that freezes plans to move away from the HP 3000. Hewlett-Packard, better staffed than any of its customers, finally turned off the HEART system on its HP 3000 cluster this fall. HEART tracked every beat of HP's orders for most of three decades. HP claimed long ago it had switched over every crucial enterprise app to SAP. Perhaps it's more true now than early in the decade, when the claim was made while 3000 Transition began. HEART had outlasted migration attempts for two decades, according to HP insiders.

"Most of you have no idea how big this is," said an HP VP to the internal IT staff in a memo, "so you’ll have to trust this old-timer… it’s HUGE!"

Other HP 3000s were recently turned toward the exits. Robert Mills announced to the 3000 community members this month who read the 3000 newsgroup that Pinnacle Entertainment "went into 'administration,' and I am one of the casualties of the first round of layoffs. I do not see Pinnacle remaining in that state long before they fold. When they do, that means that two HP 3000 979/400s will lose their home." Mills, like some in the community, is working at consulting that relates to the 3000 while looking for a more permanent position.

Unix is on the rise at places like Pinnacle, although it's only a 50-50 chance that it's HP's Unix taking over. Sun's solutions, and even SUSE Linux, are replacing HP 3000s. Oracle is often the platform in such cases, rather than the operating environment.

Meanwhile, Shoreline Community College, West of Seattle, continues to use an HP 3000 for its student information systems. Despite the best attempts of both Amisys and Ecometry/Escalate, both companies will have a significant share of their customers still running 3000s during 2009. Customers are just now considering replacements for systems like Series 937s, computers which were built early in the Clinton Administration. A tiny Integrity 2660 will replace a 937 nicely, and the 2660 is very affordable. The cost resides in moving software and training for Unix.

And since the HP 3000 is a big player in the history of computing, the history movement for the computer is gaining help. After this summer's MPE software history symposium at the Computer History Museum, Paul Raulerson will launch a history project next month, a not-for-profit Web site "funded primarily out of my beer money funds." Raulerson wants to preserve stories from the 3000 community, "and make them available to other people to enjoy and marvel at. The goals will be conservation and preservation of the histories and stories that surround the HP 3000 computer and related items of interest, such as the MPE operating system."

There's more 3000 history to be written in 2009, even as the effort to capture the tales of the past gathers volunteers and momentum. But this time of year is well-suited for reflection and revising of career courses. As well as R&R, of course. We're taking a couple of days off from the blog to reflect on the big stories of this year and enjoy the gifts of family and friends. We'll be back on Monday with our 2008 Top Story list, along with a review of what we predicted for this year and how our forecasts turned out. Have a happy holiday.

Where they are now: Robelle founders

Robelle is a household name among vendors and leaders of the HP 3000 community, helping companies remain on the platform "until at least 2016," according to its Web site. Suprtool is also a key component in enabling migrations from MPE/iX to HP-UX. Good tools have a wide scope of functionality.

The company was founded by Bob Green in the late 1970s, and soon afterward joined and bolstered by David Greer. Early in this decade, Greer left Robelle for adventures on a two-year family Mediterranean sailing cruise, while Green took full ownership of the company and kept its offerings abreast of the community's needs, relying on the expertise of developer Neil Armstrong and the support team in the company's Vancouver, BC offices.

Green was at the birth of the HP 3000 inside Hewlett-Packard, writing for the company and documenting the launch team's work. During the 1990s he opened a branch of Robelle on the island of Anguilla in the British West Indies. Bob (at left on that beach) updated us recently on his development workplaces and Robelle's operations. Meanwhile, Greer rejoined the IT world after his sabbatical, taking on management and marketing positions outside the 3000 community.

Green said that island life in the Carribean still floats his boat. "Our permanent residence is still Anguilla. But we also spend time in St. Barths, and during Aug-Sept. we are in Asheville, NC for hurricane season."

While he praised us for keeping the threads of the HP 3000 community alive, Green said that Robelle's business has held on "much later than I ever expected." Armstrong long ago converted Suprtool to run on the HP Integrity servers under HP-UX -- and HP's Alvina Nishimoto said this year that the Unix version of this database tool has prompted many 3000 migrations onto Unix, rather than Windows. The future of Robelle's Qedit programmer development suite looks sound, too.

As for Greer, he's a prolific member of the Linked In online social network, and he just published a management strategy paper called "Thriving Through the Downturn: Eleven Strategies That Will Make Your Company Boom." He served on IT startup boards on his return to the industry, and now is a senior advisor to VanRx Pharmaceuticals and CEO Chris Procyshyn. His Linked In profile states that

David mines his decades of business and entrepreneurial experience to provide advice on corporate development, business plans, product strategy, and financing. He is excited at the potential for the company and its products to dramatically change and improve the manufacturing and production of aseptic drugs.

In HP's lee, solo experts keep up 3000s

This morning is the first of a two-week darkness at HP, the holiday time when the company has closed its doors. HP's labs are going dark for 3000 customers for good. It's a time when the independent wizards will rise up to create workarounds for complex problems. The wind of HP's changes for the 3000, even to aid support, has now fallen. The community is on the leeward side of 3000 Island.

Independents keep the breezes moving, though. These support sources can be small in staff. But compared to the number of 3000 lab experts who will work at HP from now on, the solo supporters still out-staff Hewlett-Packard.

Some of the slightly-larger independent companies are making strategic resources available by region, so a solo provider takes on support of clients across an area of a country. Jason Peel, who’s part of The MPE Support Group, said that the 3000’s reliability and stability keep support demands manageable for a single provider.

“I don’t really get that many calls at night,” he said. “It seems like everyplace I walk into now, instead of lights-out, 24x7 operations, it’s no lights on the weekends. After 5 o’clock, most of the [IT operations] people are gone, because the processing just runs.”

Solo supporters like Peel, or John Stephens of Take Care of IT, work on other platforms occasionally. But they report that their 3000 work keeps them busy nearly 100 percent of their available time. Stephens said he’s gotten an MCSE Windows certification, but it’s the 3000 knowledge which keeps him in the IT management business. Much of the work is available because companies have no more 3000 expertise on the payroll.

“More than half of the situations are basically shops where the last known expert on MANMAN on the 3000, for example, has retired,” he said. The one-man IT shop, so common among 3000 customers, lends itself to a solo supporter like Stephens, he explained.

“We have clients that have five people in an IT group, but we have super-small clients who don’t have anybody,” Peel said. “While we were doing a project with one client, we were getting status updates from the senior VP.”

The smaller support providers find ways to support one another in the community as well. Stephens said he’s got backup from another provider, but in the end, “I’m the last man standing. I have colleagues in the business I can ask to keep an eye on things for me. But realistically, month-long European vacations are not in the cards for me anytime soon.”

Vacations and holidays are already underway in Europe, and soon in North America for many IT customers. HP is taking its holiday away from development and sales in this quiet time, too. But it's a permanent holiday for the 3000 labs which back up HP's support from today onward. The virtual lab of allied independents is leaving the doors open and the lights on for the community.

Small supporters sprout up

    The 3000 community has developed a preference for non-HP support of its systems. But in recent years, even single-manned support companies are keeping HP 3000s in production. The lightly-manned support firms are serving both homesteaders and customers who are working on migrations.

    John Stephens, who founded Take Care of IT at the start of the decade, says his company not only takes up HP’s 3000 support work — he rarely sees HP support in a client’s picture.

    “I think it was about four years ago,” Stephens said of his contact. “I can’t say I got a lot of help from them.” He counts all sizes of customers among his clientele, including Fujitsu and Schlumberger.

   

Large or small company size doesn’t matter to a solo supporter like Stephens. “In the actual work, it’s still a 3000, it still has interaction with other boxes and applications. The scale of the company doesn’t really change the scale of the project.”

    Smaller vendors have been a big part of the 3000’s success. The most experienced software companies in the community are run at under 20 employees, for the most part. But support in the one-man range has been rare up to now. Gilles Schipper of GSA Associates stood for decades as a low-staff support shop with large clients.

    The size of the newer support companies is giving rise to the number of choices for 3000 service. “In addition to the traditional experts,” said Adager’s CEO Rene Woc, “we’ve been seeing some new individuals doing most of the facilities management at some of our customer sites.”

MPE/iX source reference may help, Adager says

Adager Corporation, the company whose 3000 products are so omnipresent they held a spot on the Hewlett-Packard corporate price list, believes there may be potential in HP's MPE/iX source code offer to the third parties supporting and developing for the 3000 community.

But at this moment — while HP's offer consists of an invitation to negotiate a reference-use-only license agreement for MPE/iX — it's hard to be sure of any source value, said Adager CEO Rene Woc. HP reports that the source for the IMAGE database will be included in a read-only reference license. It's not the first time third parties like Adager have used HP's source.

"We haven't had access to IMAGE source code for a long time, since the MPE V days, but we have a feeling of what would be involved," Woc said. "I think that it all depends on how [the source] is made available. IMAGE is orders of magnitude more complex today, even though it hasn't had development in close to 10 years."

The source code "is probably a security blanket," Woc said. "In that respect, it's good that it will be available, that they're starting to offer some things. We'll have to see what kind of conditions HP will offer in their license agreements." 

But having source access though a license will not automatically make a license holder a better provider of products and services, he added. "You cannot assume, even with good source code readers, that the solutions will pop up," he said. "A lot of the problems we see these days are due to interactions between products. So the benefit for the customer would be based more on the troubleshooting skills that an organization can provide."

Adager has built and maintained a reputation for such troubleshooting in the community, becoming the vendor called first, as well as a last resort, when HP 3000 difficulties arise — especially in database and data corruption crises. Many companies maintain a support contract with the company for the value of this troubleshooting as much as for the management power of the Adager software.

"The basic resources [of source] won't make things better by themselves. It's a matter of troubleshooting," Woc said.

The picture at enterprise sites can be complex, including the IMAGE Transaction Manager which is outside of MPE/iX, plus products such as NetBase for system replication which intercept IMAGE calls, then the IMAGE operations inside the database. This configuration is common to reasonably large shops "which have applications that start misbehaving, and then no source code will tell you what the problem is. You have to do a significant amount of troubleshooting first to know in which ballpark to look."

These kinds of support issues might involve multiple ballparks, something Woc says Adager gets involved in on a regular basis. "That's why our customers are happy to remain on their Adager maintenance, even though Adager is the tool to let them repair the database corruption. They actually get the time of people that can if not provide solutions, at least ask questions that eventually help the users find a way around the problem. And in this day and age if you're running one of those 24x7 shops, you're interested in getting your system back online, even if that involves a workaround."

Yes, he said, "source code is important whenever these kinds of organizations have support from HP, which most of them do." But HP engineers can look at source, just as third parties will do, "and the answers won't come instantaneously. In the meantime, you have to get your business back on track, and I think that's what the customer is eventually interested in. it will be nice to have that additional [source code] resource — especially in the sense that it will not be lost to the community."

HP's terms of license are crucial to determining the value of any release of source code, Woc stressed. "They may be too restrictive, to the point where you say that you are better off not knowing, because then I'm free to use all the methods we've worked with while we didn't have source." After getting a license to source, "you might have to prove that you got your knowledge through a difference source than HP's source code. We will see."

A generation grows proud of its grey

    This month I went to a supper of congratulations to celebrate my advent of becoming a grandfather. My son Nick and his wife Elisha are expecting a baby in July, a mitzvah that will launch a new generation of Seybolds. When I first wrote in this 3000 market, Nick was just a baby of 2. Now he and his bride are having a baby of their own.

    I don’t feel like it’s time to get a new job. This one keeps changing enough to remain fascinating and entertaining and enlightening. Change is most of what I’ve reported in this decade. The world of our industry has changed so much since Nick’s birth marked a new generation, the Millennials. Now his world doesn't even marvel at the Web, a word I hear less today as our online lives meld more into real life.

    The transformation of communication has helped your community. This season saw an historic election aided by the influence of the Internet, technology that all of you helped to cement into the world of 2008. If not for your long nights over the ENK/ACK debugging, finding the X.25 cloud, planning the networking protocol stack and tuning those Ethernet LANs, I couldn’t check on the vote predictions (remarkably accurate) at fivethirtyeight.com.

    Over this weekend, the NewsWire's co-founder Abby helped me celebrate my mom's 83rd birthday. Ginny Seybold has spent about as much time living in Las Vegas as the HP 3000 has spent on HP's non-strategic list, between the system's doghouse status as a non-Windows, non-Unix solution and the Transition Era of more than seven years and counting. Mom tells us she never figured to have a good run well into her middle 80s. Everything ends, but the matter of when is rarely something we know for certain.

   

It seems like every month there’s a new toy to be launched in a browser, another word that feels more like a throwback to the nascent days of the Internet. After my grandchild arrives next summer, I’ll have old toys that I’ll be eager to share, some like curious slot-car sets and others as redoubtable as Dr. Suess and Goodnight Moon.

    Each time I share the news about becoming an expectant grandpa, people ask if it makes me feel old. The happy event has more of an impact of pride, accomplishment, and faith in the persistence and luck of parenthood. People may be asking if you’re feeling old now that HP’s given up on the 3000, a good run of 30-plus years. But HP cannot create the next generation of 3000 use, a time when the vendor will only stand by and watch what will be born.

   I believe in the Afterlife, as I call it in another article this month, only because of the Internet. Were it not for the magic of file servers archiving across the planet, free advice delivered in minutes with detail, and the adoption of this technical chariot by your community, you would have declared your 3000s dead long ago. As it is now, the system that proves your accomplishments will go on further than anyone could have imagined in that year of 1984, when Nick was a baby himself. I consider what comes after HP’s 3000 time in 2010 to be a new generation of users, the ones who will toddle and then walk on their own without Hewlett-Packard to hold their hands.

   Consider sites like Facebook and Linked In and even Connect’s myCommunity as your cradles in these times of growth — plus the older outposts of newsgroups and mailing lists, and yes, even focused blogs like ours. Out on Linked In, the HP 3000 Community Group is now more than 90 members strong, full of advice and experience and a link to making 3000 skills work in new opportunities. Being older doesn’t become an insult when you’re rebirthing the rules for elder-hood. You gotta grow to gain that grey.

HP offers museum pieces

As part of its exit from the 3000 community, Hewlett-Packard pledged to give the Computer History Museum a chunk of the 3000's heritage, from frozen code to hardware that can still heat up a room.

MPE/iX software will become part of HP's donation to the museum in Mountain View, Calif. sometime next year, according to HP's latest update on its end-game decisions about the platform. Museum docent Stan Sieler reports that there are already HP 3000s of varying vintages stashed away in the museum archives, although none are on display for the hundreds of thousands of visitors.

HP intends, but hasn't made a full commitment, to make a donation to the museum "to help preserve the history of the HP 3000 and MPE/iX," said Mike Paivien. The contractor has been brought back to his old HP division to help sort out the final decisions about what HP will leave behind for the community. MPE/iX source code is among the vendor's donations, apparently in a format far different from the one which requires an application for third-party support companies.

"There will be hardware and some level of documentation across the HP 3000 lifespan," Paivinen added. "As with most donations, it's things that are old. We're not necessarily going to try to create a complete view of everything. But we're looking at everythign that we have on hand."

HP still owns HP 3000 systems that are churning out data processing for the company, and the servers are likely to be performing even while the vendor decides what to send off to the museum. But the definition of museum materials can be artistic are well as legendary, and at the least the key components of a legacy.

At this summer's meeting at the History Museum of 3000 software pioneers, one founder of this legacy pointed out what makes the 3000 a distinctive stop on a tour of computing history. "The history of computing is not the history of invention for the 3000," said Doug Meacham, the founder of the Interex user group. "It's the history of people coming together, like at the Denver user group meeting in 1978."

Community made the difference in setting the 3000's place in history, he said. The Denver meeting, less than two years after HP made IMAGE a fundamental part of the HP 3000 systems, featured talks from Adager and Robelle founders on breakthroughs in 3000 data management. The 3000 had three things going for it at first that gave the minicomputer a way to win a place in batch-ridden computer departments. It had IMAGE included, something no other supplier could even imagine. Meacham said "HP knew nothing about software" other than IMAGE, "so there were a lot of openings for third parties."

And the computer had a user group dedicated to it in Interex, one that worked alongside HP to help mature the 3000 into a business workhorse powerful enough to last more than three decades.

Migrating data made easier

Bill Miller, founder of Genesis Total Solutions, runs his business to serve both homesteading and migrating HP 3000 customers. He's even looking for new business this year and next, by selling his company's suite of financials into HP 3000 sites which are thinking of migration someday but aren't his customers already.

Part of Miller's comfort with both sides of transition comes from his adoption of Eloquence as his database on non-3000 platforms. In a Q&A with him we asked why Oracle, much more of a perceived industry standard, was not as good a choice as the IMAGE-workalike Eloquence. Since the Genesis applications are included inside Ecometry e-commerce installations, we also asked Miller how Ecometry migrations are playing out today.

Since there’s been so much movement from the 3000 to Windows, why not go with a SQL Server database on open systems?

   Microsoft SQL is a proprietary database. It just runs on one place. We liked the idea that Eloquence would run on multiple platforms, and it looks just like IMAGE. We had no learning curve to go through. There was almost nothing we had to do to get the Eloquence database done. We were happy with the new features on it, and thus far we haven’t had a single problem with Eloquence.

   That was the smartest decision we made, because if I’ve got a Linux, Unix or Windows platform, I’ve got a database that will move. I sell it that way. To me, it’s not an open platform if you’re selling a Windows-only product. That’s a proprietary operating system. We offer an open system and an open database.

    Selling an open system helps us with the new clients we have who’ve never heard of an HP 3000. We tell them we’ve got a solution that runs on all sorts of platforms, database included. Windows seems to be the hot product now, but it may not be in the future. Linux may take over one day, or something else.

HP gave the 3000 application vendors their marching orders early in 2002. How long did it take you to migrate?

    We did it over a period of a year, but it’s not like we only worked on that migration during that time. We’ve got 10 applications and took our most popular ones and started moving them one at a time, all modular. The first one took an effort while we did our learning. The second was easier, and so on. Finally we were doing a whole application of 50 programs in a week or two, if we had to. The first one probably took us two months to figure out.

The developers doing the migrations — how did their training impact the success?

    We knew every line of this code inside and out, tested and true. I’m not going to say there’s never been a bug in GTS software, but the same people who developed it were involved with the migration. That’s why it was clean. Because of the stability of our staff, it means that our stuff is still working after the migration. 

Do you think the migration schedule for Ecometry sites is going to step up, now that the vendor says they will drop 3000 app support after 2009?

  There is another solution. The Ecometry people are putting a lot of pressure on their clients to move to other systems during this period. Some clients are going to leave Ecometry. Some will migrate with Ecometry to another platform. And some say, “I’m just going to stay with my 3000, and I don’t care about support. If they don’t want to support me, I’ll just going to keep using it and do whatever changes I can.”

    A guy will say he hasn’t had any changes [to Ecometry] in two years, so why would he want to do it today? But 90 percent of them are either going to leave or migrate with Ecometry. But I think some will either try to support it [on the 3000] themselves, or get some third party to answer questions as situations arise. And I think Ecometry may very well decide they don’t want to lose the money from those customers. They may say they’ll do nothing more than answer questions, and not make another line change of code.

So then you’re in a good position there, being able to support them on the 3000 even if they don’t migrate with Ecometry?

    I’ve had one like that already. They’ve told us they like our systems and they’re going to leave Ecometry, and they’ve even looked at another system. Although quite honestly, I’m not encouraging anybody to leave Ecometry.

Are you prepared to support your 3000 customers for as long as they need to stay on the platform?

  Sure. If they want to be on the platform for five, 10 years, and they’ve got somebody who can support the equipment, I’ll be glad to take care of our software. That’s because it’s the same code [across all platforms]. We generally compile the stuff and make changes on the 3000, and recompile it and stick it on PC in matter of a few minutes.

Since the changes cross platforms so easily, can new business for you in the 3000 community become a source for a migration opportunity?

I’m looking for 3000 people who will buy into my philosophy of “hey, how’d you like to stick with something you’ve known for years?” We’ll help them customize our stuff to fit their business, and when they’re ready, we’ll move them from the 3000. I’d like to find 3000 customers who are willing to do that. If they are, I’d like to be their supplier.

Q&A: Toting Up Transition's Tally

Bill Miller finds solutions that add up for 3000 sites, no matter where a client is headed. The founder of financials app vendor Genesis Total Solutions, Miller has a customer base that is both migrating and homesteading. His firm supports either choice with no end date for staying and no changes required for leaving.

The solution at Genesis was to build a work-alike version of the company’s application and then give the clients a choice to carry them into the future. As a 3000 community veteran of more than 25 years, Miller respects the value in a stable platform, but he’s also founding his future on the opportunity offered by moving to Windows, Unix or Linux.

    The Genesis apps run standalone on many 3000 sites, and ever-more industry standard platforms, but they’re also embedded in Escalate Retail’s Ecometry e-commerce applications. This app-within-an-app perspective, bolstered by experience and knowledge of the 3000 customer, gives Miller a profile we couldn’t resist. It’s not easy to find a Founder who’s as facile in the world of open systems as in the homeland of HP 3000 users. We contacted him to tell us how the company has modernized the interface of its 3000 application with ScreenJet, but discovered a story even deeper.

What’s your mix of homestead and migrating sites now, seven years after HP’s pullout announcement?

    We probably have at least as many HP 3000 customers, if not more, than we do on open systems. Most people who have the 3000 would just as soon not change. They’ve invested time and money in it and it works, or they’d be using something else.

    I think most of our clients are facing the situation that a migration is going to have to be done. They’re looking at their options, but I rarely find someone who’s in a panic to do something about it. What we’ve told them, and the reason they may be going slower than some migrators, is that we’ve already migrated our software over. And with the Eloquence database that we’re using [for migrations], it’s basically a similar database to the one on the 3000, so we can migrate your data. We tell them if they give us a few days, we can migrate programs and data over to an open platform. They say that’s great, they don’t have to worry about it anymore. If they want to migrate next week, or six months from now, or five years from now, fine.

What technologies have you picked to make the transitions easier for you, as well as your customers?
    We use ScreenJet, and AcuCOBOL from Micro Focus, and Eloquence. The conversion has been clean. Since we’ve done it and are ready to help them whenever they want, they don’t have to sweat it. We also don’t charge for our migration, other than the new runtime charges now in place. They don’t have to worry about spending a lot of money. If they buy our software one time, they never have to buy it again.

Is migration making business for you on 3000s, since you have the most 3000-like technologies in place?

    I had one guy who wasn’t a current customer and wanted to migrate. I told him we’d get him onto our 3000 application and off his custom software. Then you know you’re only a few days off your migration to an open system. We use migration as a selling factor [on 3000s].

How did the migration become simpler for you and your customers?

    We made it a policy to stick with vanilla HP choices. Yes, we use an Adager or DBGeneral for database handling, but when it came down to our processes we didn’t use a third party anything, for development or support. We used QUERY that came with the 3000, but the new Eloquence comes with a QUERY [for open systems] just like that one.

So what motivated the choice of ScreenJet in migration and modernization?

    We were looking for something as easy to migrate with as we could get. We went with the easiest tool to get us as close as we could to what we were doing before the migration, because we had another issue — we’ve got a lot of clients. We didn’t want to come up with something entirely different that we’d have to retrain them on how to use the system. In all the systems we have migrated, I haven’t had to do one training session.

    ScreenJet helped the migration process because we moved our screens over virtually identical to what they were before. I could use the migration tools and set up a screen just the way I wanted, using AcuBench’s ScreenJet conversion tools. I could do it in just a few minutes in some cases. For as many screens as we had over the 10 systems we have, I needed something as easy as possible.