HP raises hopes, profits and revenues

Hewlett-Packard intended to release its full Q2 2008 fiscal report yesterday, but a little event like spending $13.9 billion on EDS has pushed the full report back to next week. A full quarterly report is always enlightening, a bit like Kremlinology of the 1970s — watching which business sectors stand shorter or taller on the company's dais. The health of HP's Services business is one of the leaders we watch, since Services is the sector where HP still collects 3000 customer revenues. HP's Services growth was flat during the last quarterly report, which might explain why the HP board swallowed the EDS deal just now.

EDS wasn't generating much of a profit when HP announced its intention to buy the company, but that didn't push HP's stock down for very long after the announcement. By Thursday HP shares had recovered about half of what they lost on the EDS news — a loss of more market cap than EDS is worth altogether.

But HP reported good preliminary news of its finances that may have helped allay any uncertainty about EDS. The preliminary results reported revenue of $28.3 billion compared with $25.5 billion one year ago. The vendor also raised its "guidance" (estimates) for business in the rest of fiscal 2008.

In the second quarter, preliminary GAAP [Generally Accepted Accounting Practices] diluted earnings per share (EPS) were $0.80 and non-GAAP diluted EPS were $0.87, compared with second quarter fiscal 2007 GAAP diluted EPS [Earnings Per Share] of $0.65 and non-GAAP diluted EPS of $0.70. Non-GAAP diluted EPS estimates exclude after-tax costs related primarily to the amortization of purchased intangible assets of approximately $0.07 per share and $0.05 per share in the second quarter of fiscal 2008 and fiscal 2007, respectively.

HP felt compelled to add in its preliminary notice that business was good across the board. "The second quarter results were highlighted by solid performance across HP's business segments and strong cash flow from operations," the company said on the same day of the EDS announcement.

HP estimates full-year FY08 revenue will be approximately $114.2 billion to $114.4 billion, up from its previous estimate of $113.5 billion to $114 billion. FY08 GAAP diluted EPS is expected to be in the range of $3.30 to $3.34, up from its previous estimate of $3.26 to $3.30

One of the tenets of the HP Way has always been "maintain profits," so the motivation for HP's product and service decisions can be read in a corporate balance sheet and the PowerPoint presentations that accompany the news. On May 20 at 5 PM EDT, the company will present the full picture. An audio Webcast of the conference call will be available at www.hp.com/investor/q22008webcast. HP usually releases a PowerPoint slide deck (in PDF format) at its financials Web site at the same time.

HP raises hopes, profits and revenues

Hewlett-Packard intended to release its full Q2 2008 fiscal report yesterday, but a little event like spending $13.9 billion on EDS has pushed the full report back to next week. A full quarterly report is always enlightening, a bit like Kremlinology of the 1970s — watching which business sectors stand shorter or taller on the company's dais. The health of HP's Services business is one of the leaders we watch, since Services is the sector where HP still collects 3000 customer revenues. HP's Services growth was flat during the last quarterly report, which might explain why the HP board swallowed the EDS deal just now.

EDS wasn't generating much of a profit when HP announced its intention to buy the company, but that didn't push HP's stock down for very long after the announcement. By Thursday HP shares had recovered about half of what they lost on the EDS news — a loss of more market cap than EDS is worth altogether.

But HP reported good preliminary news of its finances that may have helped allay any uncertainty about EDS. The preliminary results reported revenue of $28.3 billion compared with $25.5 billion one year ago. The vendor also raised its "guidance" (estimates) for business in the rest of fiscal 2008.

In the second quarter, preliminary GAAP [Generally Accepted Accounting Practices] diluted earnings per share (EPS) were $0.80 and non-GAAP diluted EPS were $0.87, compared with second quarter fiscal 2007 GAAP diluted EPS [Earnings Per Share] of $0.65 and non-GAAP diluted EPS of $0.70. Non-GAAP diluted EPS estimates exclude after-tax costs related primarily to the amortization of purchased intangible assets of approximately $0.07 per share and $0.05 per share in the second quarter of fiscal 2008 and fiscal 2007, respectively.

HP felt compelled to add in its preliminary notice that business was good across the board. "The second quarter results were highlighted by solid performance across HP's business segments and strong cash flow from operations," the company said on the same day of the EDS announcement.

HP estimates full-year FY08 revenue will be approximately $114.2 billion to $114.4 billion, up from its previous estimate of $113.5 billion to $114 billion. FY08 GAAP diluted EPS is expected to be in the range of $3.30 to $3.34, up from its previous estimate of $3.26 to $3.30

One of the tenets of the HP Way has always been "maintain profits," so the motivation for HP's product and service decisions can be read in a corporate balance sheet and the PowerPoint presentations that accompany the news. On May 20 at 5 PM EDT, the company will present the full picture. An audio Webcast of the conference call will be available at www.hp.com/investor/q22008webcast. HP usually releases a PowerPoint slide deck (in PDF format) at its financials Web site at the same time.

Nothing much new, said by new speakers

About two dozen HP partners and customers took less than a hour today to log into HP's latest update on the system which it calls the e3000. The event was aimed at partners in the Europe, Middle East and Africa HP region (EMEA), but was accessible worldwide. By the time 45 minutes had elapsed, HP had presented less than three dozen PowerPoint slides to the partners, nearly all of which contained zero news.

At least none to our eyes, since we had seen presentations by HP about the platform and migrations at the March GHRUG International Technology Conference. In fact, the e3000 partners got less information from the vendor than GHRUG attendees received, as HP skipped the "Who owns MPE/iX" section of its March presentation. (Download your own copy of the GHRUG slides, as presented by HP e3000 business manager Jennie Hou.)

But we heard a new speaker or two. An uncounted number of partners listened on dial-in phone links to Bernard Determe, whose presence on the HP e3000 EMEA Customers Webinar served as the only new voice. Determe is HP's World Wide Support Planning Manager, a name and voice the world's e3000 users can attach to the vendor's decisions about how long HP will remain in the 3000 community. We say decisions in the plural because, as Determe pointed out today, HP has made three 3000 decisions in all, one following another until "we lose our lab."

HP's speech was not without "color," as we journalists like to call "more speaking about a fact you have already been told." Determe noted that the vendor discovered twice that people are still relying on the 3000 — a point that has sparked two revisions of its support plans.

HP has changed its timeline, but never its intentions, he said. "Since early in the 2000s, we've been pretty consistent in the message we have delivered," Determe said. That is, HP intends to exit the 3000 community and curtail its support, the event the vendor insists on calling "end of life" for the HP 3000.

Life has gone on, he added. "In 2001 we announced the platform would be obsolete in five years, but we were still doing full support and limited development. History has taught us that migrating from any platform to another is a pretty significant endeavor," Determe said, "and many of our customers were still on the e3000 by the end of '06."

Despite HP's discovery of continued 3000 life in 2005, and then in 2007, the vendor seems serious about ending its support in 2008. Well, some kind of support, especially any which requires HP lab development to fix problems. That's what "Mature Product Support without Sustaining Engineering" means, he said.

"We still offer the same level of from the front line engineers, but we lose our labs," Determe said, "which means there won't be any more PowerPatches [in 2009] there won't be fixes for newly-discovered bugs. We won't be offering new MPE/iX versions so we will stop charging for update services."

As long as customers only wish to call HP for workarounds and fixes to existing problems, "nothing changes [through 2010]," he said. "The only thing that changes is that HP will be unable to provide you with fixes to newly-discovered problems."

Nobody should interpret the extensions as a change of HP strategy about the 3000's lifespan in the vendor's business. But "if some of you feel that what we will offer in '09 and '10 does not meet your needs, I strongly encourage you to get in touch with your HP contact, and we can see what type of custom solutions or transition plans we can build together, to help you migrate to another platform."

Liz Glogowski of the e3000 labs in HP presented the information about HP's Right to Use license (RTU). She called it "a new product that allows for upgrading to different levels [of HP 3000s]. As we've matured we've stopped selling the upgrade options, and yet people still needed to move, to do things like go from a 2-way to 4-way [CPU] on a system."

Glogowski reviewed a list of upcoming deliverables (one remaining PowerPatch 5 for MPE/iX 7.5, to be released "in the next few weeks" by Determe's calcuations) and deliverables for 2007. The accomplishments she listed "from the R&D lab" are

• Samba Porting white paper
• SCSI Pass-Thru Driver Enhancement
• Two critical data integrity patches
• MPE/iX7.0 PowerPatch 5
• Samba Release 3.0.22
• Securing FTP White Paper
• 2007 Daylight Savings Time Changes

Glogowski said that R&D lab engineers are working on peripherals, storage and networking white papers during the remaining 31 weeks of 2008 before the lab reaches its end of life.

HP to present 3000 report

HP 3000 community members might want to have their browsers tuned to the Hewlett-Packard Virtual Rooms Web site tomorrow. At 10 AM EDT (4 PM CET) the vendor will present a 90-minute Webcast on its view of the 3000's future and the past:

    * Review last year activities for MPE
    * Discuss latest announcements
    * Discuss migrations and transition tools and partners

You can dial in to the conference to hear HP's audio presentation. Call from the US at 866-832-0714, Germany at 069 2222 3190, the UK at 01452 555 574 and Canada at 866 530 4984. Other countries throughout the world have dialup numbers as well (listed at the end of this posting); the main number is the UK-based 44 1452 555 574. The conference code to supply at the prompt is 50 63 65#.

HP will present the PowerPoint slide deck for the Webcast at its Virtual Rooms site. The meeting key is EPAAPKCNJ9. Testing your browser and PC/Mac configuration beforehand is a good idea; links to do so are available at the site. HP's software won't use the Firefox browsers on either Windows or Mac PCs.

The Virtual Rooms technology from HP is also for rent by the hour, so the Webcast will offer one way to assess the potential for using this tool for your own company communication.

HP has an FAQ page on the HP Virtual Rooms, which are available for both meetings and training sessions:

Used by hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, HP Virtual Rooms provides a highly collaborative environment for small to large groups. Our products help you implement a cost effective, secure, and flexible solution for your current business needs while positioning you to take full advantage of future virtual training and virtual meeting functionality.

Our outstanding, reliable, and easy-to-use technology, deep knowledge of distance learning, ability to develop content, and worldwide, round-the-clock service allows customers to get important work done-in entirely new and better ways. We use this technology ourselves, throughout HP, giving us first-hand knowledge about our user needs.

At $180 per seat for a minimum 10-seat license, Virtual Rooms is not priced to compete with WebEx. But we've seen the technology used several years ago in an all-day OpenMPE meeting, hosted at HP's facilities back when Interex's HP World conference had gone belly-up. Even in 2005 it looked slick and complete for an audience of advanced technology users.

The full list of dial-in phone numbers for the conference:

Australia     1800 679 161
Austria     019 289 550
Belgium     024 003 450
Canada     1866 530 4984
China North     10800 712 1523
China South     10800 120 1523
Denmark 032 714 925
Finland     0800 117 112
France     01 70 70 07 60
Germany 069 2222 3190
Greece     00800 126 056
Hong Kong     800 963 831
Hungary 06800 15312
Ireland     01 4319 647
Israel     180 921 3988
Italy     023 600 3762
Malaysia     1800 805994
Netherlands     020 713 2968
Norway     800 18430
Poland     00800 121 0132
Portugal     211 201 811
Russia     8~10 800 2230 1012
Singapore     800 1205 507
South Africa     0800 990 918
Spain     914 146 117
Sweden     08 566 184 84
Switzerland     044 580 3457
Turkey     00800 1420 38506
UK     01452 555 574
USA     1866 832 0714

HP, EDS to serve as one

HP announced its largest acquisition since the company purchased Compaq, buying services and integration provider EDS for $13.9 billion. EDS, founded by former US presidential candidate Ross Perot, still manages about 200 HP 3000s, according to a CEO of a software company in the 3000 community. One community member who knows both EDS and HP from earlier times said the two firms are more alike today than they ever were in the 1970s and 1980s.

"The corporate cultures at HP and EDS were totally opposite in their treatment of employees [in the 1970’s]," said former OpenMPE director Paul Edwards, "when I was an employee of each company. HP has now the attitude toward their employees that EDS did back then. After watching my new DVD Origins from HP, which shows the way they valued employees and the HP Way, I really miss that environment."

Edwards sent us the message today from Dallas, which is the EDS headquarters city. He pointed out that EDS has been "a very IBM-oriented company." This might make an HP enterprise customer, mostly the ones who will stay with the vendor through their 3000 transition, wonder why HP wanted to spend so much for a consulting and integration company. The deal more than doubles HP's Services revenues; that sector billed $16.6 billion last year. EDS generated $22.1 billion in revenue in 2007 and has approximately 140,000 employees in 65 countries. HP's headcount has nearly doubled immediately to a total of 312,000, with more than half of its workers now dedicated to services.

The markets dealt out a sharp sell-off of HP stock in their immediate reaction. HP lost more market cap during the first 24 hours after the announcement than the total value of EDS.

Services is high profit, so much so that HP will create a separate EDS group as part of its strategy. The only HP businesses which generate more profits are systems and HP's ink sales. Services is long-term money, not the constant battle of printers and imaging or the tough sell and churn of enterprise servers and storage. Services is lucrative, which is why HP has been after this kind of company ever since the Compaq deal's ink was dry.

Not long after Carly Fiorina engineered that Compaq merger, fighting back half of HP's shareholders, her executives reached out for Price Waterhouse Cooper, the largest of all independent "C&I" firms, as they're called in the industry. The PWC deal didn't make it out of an HP boardroom vote, a harbinger of the dissent to come about HP's style of growth. At the time, the PWC deal was a $16 billion purchase. Since HP is getting EDS for $2 billion less, four years later, this is a much bigger value at a time when HP needs to maintain revenue growth.

Purchasing massive competitors is becoming a favorite HP strategy to grow. The Mercury Interactive purchase of 2006 clocked in at nearly $7 billion, and it was aimed at enterprise users, too. HP considers the services sector an important part of its enterprise strategy. This is clearly not a deal aimed at the PC buyers or customers who toss an ink cartridge into their grocery carts once a month. HP said of the purchase,

This acquisition fills out a part of our portfolio that we consider to be strategically important. This acquisition will strengthen our ability to compete in the important services segment. By using our technology to automate, we will be able to drive greater efficiencies for our customers on a global basis while expanding our offerings in key segments and extending our reach in important vertical industries.

HP has an extensive press kit on the deal, announced just two days before the company's Q2 report. Purchasing the number one services provider will make waves and perhaps tilt HP toward services as a hedge on printer and imaging revenues.

Encompass, Euro Interex, ITUG Connect users

Four user groups became as one this week when the Encompass, Interex Europe, ITUG NonStop and Encompass Pacific joined hands as Connect. The new name is a result of the research required to acquire Web addresses and trademarks, according to president Nina Buik. But the user group alliance, now 50,000 strong, took its name as part of its primary mission.

"That's what we do," Buik said. "We connect members to each other, we connect members to HP and HP's partners, we connect members to education — so we thought it was a very appropriate name for the new organization." She invited members and the HP IT community to visit hpusercommunity.org to get "the feel of the new networking tools." The HP Technology Forum employed user networking tools in its 2007 conference.

It took 27 directors of the allied user groups to decide on things like names and committees, but only a dozen will be serving on the Connect board. Board representation includes members from each of the founding users groups. Buik, former president of Encompass, will lead the board as president. Margo Holen will serve as vice president, Glen Kuykendall was elected secretary/treasurer, and Scott Healy, former ITUG president, will serve as immediate past president. Newly elected directors include Steve Davidek — formerly of the Interex advocacy committee, and an HP 3000 site manager — Bill Johnson, Jay McLaughlin, Henk Pomper, Joe Ramos, Dr. Michael Rossbach, Gerhard Wedenig and Brad Harwell (HP).

Buik said that seating a vendor official on a user group board is not new to the ITUG members, but it's a novel appointment among most user groups' leadership. The HP user group Interex never had an HP employee on its board in 30 years, but had an HP liasion each year.

"We maintain numerous executive relationships," Buik said. "Brad Harwell is an HP executive and was named as the liaison to the new board. For clarity, David Parsons is a director." Parsons is an executive VP of Hewlett-Packard and ran point for the Technology Forum in its first year, when Interex had folded. Harwell is director of marketing in the Technical Solutions Group for the Americas at HP.

Advocacy efforts will be "stronger than ever" for the Connect group, which calls HP its strategic business partner. Encompass embraced the enterprise customer base as "an independent, pre-eminent worldwide community of users of HP enterprise technologies." The Connect advocacy to HP on behalf of the 3000 enterprise community might not be able to reverse HP's decision to drop MPE/iX certifications next month.

Buik has been on several conference calls to discuss the certifications, she said. "HP is aware of the expiring HP 3000 certifications, as I have been on several calls discussing this very issue.  As you know, certifications change as the technologies change. It's not always a popular decision."

Joining together to create a single user group has been HP's desire. "We congratulate the groups on this significant accomplishment," said HP's Harwell. "It will provide HP a direct, unified customer forum representing the greater HP user community interests worldwide.” Harwell said the combined groups will help customers worldwide "access an expanding portfolio of HP technologies."

However much ease HP has gained in working with a single group, the amassed customers will be working on raising the user voice to the vendor. "We look at multiple ways to get our voice 'Hurd,' " Buik said. "Please see my [Encompass] blog for more on this. There is an Adocacy Committee and the chair of this and all Connect committees will be volunteers! Board members will serve as liaisons for each committee."

Committee leaders were not decided when Connect made its alliance announcement yesterday.

Members of each user group will have complimentary membership in Connect through the end of 2008. The official launch celebration for Connect will take place at next month's HP Technology Forum & Expo, which kicks off June 16 for four days in Las Vegas.

HP's 3000 voice sounds like silence

We could almost call this entry "A lack of news outta HP," but even no news is notable. It's not good news for 3000 customers that HP's gone so quiet, the subject of our podcast for this month (6 MB, six minutes of 'cast.)

Notice how quiet it has become out there? When an advocacy group for MPE hears no HP answers to the big questions, when the vendor speaks up only in a room of 50 people or less, when the messages in forums show up less than a handful a month, you get the picture HP wants to deliver. “We’re curtailing our 3000 work,” the vendor says to anybody in earshot. Been saying it for some time now.

The voices which know the answers sit very still inside the HP Services group. More often than ever, the HP 3000 group at Hewlett-Packard issues increasing sounds of silence.

Linear advice saves tape storage solution

A 3000 community member who is obviously homesteading asked for help installing a Digital Linear Tape device today. His question to the HP 3000 newsgroup was "Why can't my Series 939 see the DLT8000 I just brought into the shop and mounted successfully?"

A couple of tape experts had good solutions to assist Joe Barnett, but both storage guru Denys Beauchemin and HP's Jim Hawkins couldn't resist much bigger advice: Migrate off that HP 3000. While Barnett contemplates that outsized project, he's got little to spark such an adventure — if his only problem is storing more data from a growing disk farm.

The experts shared a wide range of counsel, from the basic of "check that media" and "tape heads wear out on DLT8000s" to "they haven't made that generation of DLT drive in five years" (a period Beauchemin likes to call a lustrum, accurate but arcane English.)

When Hawkins stepped in to comment on Beauchemin's advice, the combination of counsel was another reason to believe in the power of the 3000 community.

Beauchemin, who's best known as Denys in the 3000 world, set off with an opinion, then followed with details. JIM of HP commented.

Denys: Unfortunately, this is the exact issue facing homesteaders and others who are delaying the migration off the HP3000, especially if they have pre-PCI machines.  The hardware to run it can only be found in antique stores and can be of varying level of readiness. You have many options open to you, but as time goes by they will more difficult to implement.

1- Look for another DLT8000 or a DLT7000, either one will work and you will not get any performance benefit from either one over the DDS-3, just more storage on one tape.

JIM >> Agreed.   Also make sure it has HP branded firmware; within the last two years had a painful set of System Aborts at a large customer due to semi-random walks through driver state machines initiated by non-certified firmware.

Denys: 2- Consider getting more DDS-3 drives.

JIM >> Agreed.  We have one medium size N-Class with something like 12 DAT24 drives -- they do either a 4x3 or 3x4 parallel storeset.   No messing with “reel” switches.

Denys: 3- Consider getting an HVD to SE/LVD SCSI converter and then trying a DDS-4 device.

JIM >> Don’t think that is an option since about 5.5/6.0  the “scsi_tape_dm” DDS driver will not “bind” to the F/W SCSI driver.   I think you may only configure the DLT (scsi_tape2_dm) driver “under” the NIO F/W SCSI HBA (fwscsi_dam).  As previously posted DAT40 with DAT24 media has worked well for some sites but DAT40 with DAT40 media is only supported on A/N-Class.

Denys: 4- Move to a PCI HP 3000 (the crippled A series or a small N-Class), then use newer LVD devices.

JIM >> Agree that PCI Systems will at least enable the usage of much newer “used” equipment and even some new stuff, if you want to buy a XP10k/12k ;-).

Denys: 5- Consider migrating from the HP 3000.  (This is the only long term solution and where I have been spending my time for the last several years. The newer server technology is light-years ahead of where the 3000 stopped and the new storage devices are incredible, fast and cheap.  The companies that we migrate are just amazed at the new hardware.)

JIM >> Agreed

Hardware, of course, is not the biggest challenge in migration. Moving programs, processes, training for new environments— that's where the work really begins. Besides, backing away from DLT is not all that uncommon in the 3000 community. At one point Denys told Joe about a needed interface, "HVD-SCSI is so last century." True enough. But storing to tape has its creaky looks, too. STORE To Disk is successful and better at carrying a 3000 into the next decade.

Tech Forum serves two 3000 talks

The HP Technology Forum put its session schedule online today, a list of talks and speakers which includes two HP 3000 updates. Most notably, HP e3000 Business Manager Jennie Hou is not listed as a speaker for either of the talks.

The Tech Forum has not specialized in HP e3000 information in its three years of existence, unless a demand for migration techniques counts high in a customer's quest for knowledge. Last year's show was the first to feature Hou as the business management speaker for an e3000 update. Hewlett-Packard carried on the tradition of naming an e3000 Contributor of the Year for 2007. It remains to be seen if Allegro's Stan Sieler will remain the final winner of the award HP has handed out since the middle 1990s.

This year's events with "e3000" in the title are one HP update on the 3000 support roadmap, offered by HP's Alvina Nishimoto, and the HP e3000 Migration Solutions Overview, a one-hour talk delivered by Director of Marketing Chris Koppe from Platinum Migrations partner Speedware. Koppe's talk during last fall's e3000 Community Meet pulled advice from migration engagements dating back to 2003. The talk abstract bills the session thus:

Don’t miss the ultimate overview of HP e3000 migration solutions. Speedware is one of only two HP e3000 Platinum Partners and has seen it all when it comes to migrations. Learn about solutions for migrating 3GL and 4GL languages, databases and third party utilities. Migration experts share their insights on straight migrations as well as more modern “legacy modernization” projects.

As for the HP Support Roadmap and Transition Options, the one-hour talk covers two years of HP's future in the community, "a review of what e3000 customers and partners can expect from HP during the next couple of years." HP tips no cards in its Vegas hand in the sessions' abstract, rallying on the same formula of customer update talks since 2003:

Learn the four areas of ongoing HP focus for the e3000 business

1. Helping customers and partners transition to other HP platforms
2. Supporting customers' business-critical environments as they transition
3. Addressing concerns of customers who may continue to depend on the HP e3000 to meet business needs beyond HP's end-of-support date
4. Comparing the various transition options.

On the other hand, the Tech Forum is ideal for hearing HP talk about futures on transition platforms such as HP-UX and Windows. The session planner shows a Tuesday talk on HP-UX Operating Environment Futures, which

explores the future roadmap strategies for the HP-UX Operating Environments. Planned future directions seek to improve flexibility, simplify software deployment and sales, add new functionality and greatly improve the customer experience. Both PA and IPF plans will be part of the presentation.

That's HP Precision Architecture (PA) as well as Itanium/Integrity views of HP-UX. At some point HP's HP-UX support for PA will be curtailed; how soon that will happen would be good information for a migrating site to take home from Las Vegas. HP's Nishimoto reported at the GHRUG conference that HP-UX was leading the field of HP's 3000 migration experience, so knowing what's next for the environment can be helpful.

There's also a Windows Vista debugging session scheduled for later on in the day, techniques which seem to be crucial this year. HP is saving HP-UX Patch Management for the final two hours of the conference in a hands-on lab that ends around 6 PM on Thursday, the third full day of the conference.

Finally, the Forum organizers report that Howie Mandell will entertain attendees who remain for the conference's final day of June 19. Encompass explains that Mandell was best known for the TV series St. Elsewhere, but now hosts the popular show Deal or No Deal. Some 3000 community members may need a laugh to help them deal with their migration challenges, so maybe a Thursday morning comedy act will fill out the bill.

New tricks for HP's old dogs, and newer, too

Earlier today HP invited computer customers to a Webcast about NetBeans, technology that will never make it onto MPE/iX servers. The novelty of the Web information, hosted by Encompass, was its target: Users of OpenVMS, the last non-industry-standard operating environment which HP supports.

And an environment HP apparently still extends, given the information in the Webinar.

A plug-in for NetBeans, provided free-of-charge by HP, allows you to use NetBeans on your desktop to develop and debug OpenVMS applications remotely. This includes not only Java applications, but C, C++, Fortran, Cobol, Basic, and Pascal applications.

HP 3000 customers might recall that Java support was a big step forward for their server — back in 1998. Since that time HP has dropped all interest in the "write once, run anywhere" language. That's too bad for homesteaders, who could benefit from this free Integrated Development Environment which has only gotten richer and more proven in the past five years.

But NetBeans, and the power of Java in general, are a good story for a migrating HP 3000 customer, either as impetus to start moving or as a tool to make the migration easier.

There's almost no chance of NetBeans ever emerging on the HP 3000, largely because Java/iX is mired in a 2001 version of Java. Release 1.3 was the final resting place for a breakthrough language that even earned a Just In Time engine for MPE/iX. Mike Yawn demonstrated the Swing interface for Java/iX at one point. Now Yawn has moved beyond HP and into development at eBay. He gives a stark assessment of the challenge of catching up Java on the 3000.

Because [HP] didn't keep porting efforts going, eventually the Java version running on MPE (JDK 1.3) was no longer supported by Sun, which  meant that HP would have been left holding the bag if problems were found in the 'core' Java code (not MPE or PA-RISC specific). So I think they had no choice but to either drop support, or port a still-supported-by-Sun version. You can guess which option was chosen.

Even if an up-to-date Java version was available for MPE, NetBeans would be a tough nut to crack.  NetBeans (and its competitor Eclipse, which is my preferred IDE of the two) both require a lot of GUI support, as well as a robust threads implementation -- two things MPE never did well.  Early on we were trying to support the AWT and Swing GUIs on top of MPE's Motif implementation, but that never worked well enough that I'd count on it being able to handle something as demanding as NetBeans or Eclipse.  So anyone taking that on would be taking on Java + Motif + pthreads, at a minimum.

Developers on Windows, Linux, Unix, Solaris, HP-UX — hey, even Mac OS X — can all take advantage of his new trick. Only HP-UX and Solaris qualify as old dogs among that list, which makes HP's OpenVMS support all the more interesting. Plug-in support to use NetBeans on a PC desktop might be considered something less than complete support. But HP's efforts for its VMS enterprise customers are still more than HP 3000 customers can hope for. You'll have to be on another environment to use this IDE, which you can check out at netbeans.org;

The NetBeans IDE is a free, open-source Integrated Development Environment for software developers. You get all the tools you need to create professional desktop, enterprise, web and mobile applications, in Java, C/C++ and even Ruby. The IDE runs on many platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris; it is easy to install and use straight out of the box.

The 6.0 release includes significant enhancements and new features, including a completely rewritten editor infrastructure, support for additional languages, new productivity features, and a simplified installation process that allows you to easily install and configure the IDE to meet your exact needs.

While Yawn said that a Java update for the 3000 is a non-starter, he did hold out some hope that OpenMPE or the 3000 community could do as much as HP has done on the plug-in concept.

I suspect NetBeans offers remote debugging capabilities similar to Eclipse. [Allegro Consultants VP] Gavin Scott and I had some discussions early on about what the sweet spot for MPE might be  — to try to support a nice client-server approach where a developer could use the Eclipse workbench (I don't think we were looking at NetBeans at the time) to debug code running on MPE.   

I don't recall whether we had grander ideas for pushing code back and forth so that you could edit/compile on the PC and then push the class files up to the 3000 for execution, but it seems like that would probably be the next step. A lot of what I'm doing at eBay is Eclipse plug-in development, so I can see now where it would be possible to create an "MPE development plug-in" that could do a lot of this stuff transparently for the developer. So from a client side it could definitely be made to work.

Another problem that OpenMPE would have if they wanted to revive the Java/iX product would be what to do for a just-in-time compiler. That's a huge effort, and not something that I think we could have ever managed if we hadn't leveraged heavily off of the work done by the HP-UX Java lab.  I have no idea whether they are still investing anything in PA-RISC; it seems probably lose-lose, because

a) If HP-UX is still actively supporting PA-RISC, then they probably would be unwilling to share the PA-RISC code for their JIT / HotSpot technology.

b) If HP-UX is Itanium only, they might be willing to share their PA-RISC code, but with no sustaining engineering effort coming from them, OpenMPE would have to figure out how to move that forward with future Java revisions. I have no doubt that [former OpenMPE director] Mark Klein or Gavin could do it, but the list probably ends there.

QSS gathers another 3000 HP expert

The man who made the Apache Web server a reality for HP 3000s has landed a post at an HP 3000 third party software firm. Mark Bixby joined Hewlett-Packard's MPE/iX lab late in the 1990s, while the vendor was still adding open source utilities to the operating system. Somehow, HP couldn't find a job this year for the man who brought domain name services and the first Web server to the HP 3000.

Bixby landed a development position at Quintessential School Systems (QSS), making him the second HP 3000 lab expert to join the K-12 applications provider during the past year. Jeff Vance, whose 28-year tenure with HP ended when he took early retirement from the company, joined the school system software firm in 2007.

To be accurate, QSS is more than just the spot where more than 100 US school systems buy an application for HP 3000s. Ever since 2003, QSS has been investigaing, developing, as well as recently shipping a vendor-neutral version of its software; that is, one that will not rely on a vendor-only operating environment like MPE/iX.

Vance joined QSS to work on the newest of platforms, open source Linux projects. Bixby seemed delighted to join his former HP colleague at the company which still serves many HP 3000 sites.

I will be taking a couple of months off to focus on various personal projects, then in July I will be joining Quintessential School Systems (QSS). I definitely look forward to working with Jeff Vance again, who also ended up at QSS after he left HP.

By the time Bixby ended his road inside HP, the company had already moved him out of HP 3000 day-to-day work. If ever there was a sign HP is taking rapid leave of your community, it's the vendor's inability to find a place for an engineer with Bixby's skills, as well as his repository of MPE/iX internals knowledge.

Bixby had done volunteer development for the 3000 community during 1998 on Apache, bringing over the Web server that's now a de-facto standard. Bixby ported the open source version of Apache to create the product that HP eventually called Apache/iX. The vendor took in both the 3000 Web server as well as its creator as part of HP's 3000 resources by the time Y2K was impending.

But HP has been cutting jobs continuously since CEO Mark Hurd arrived, a process which former CEO Carly Fiorina launched with the Compaq merger in 1999. Bixby located a new development lab to work at just weeks after he sent feelers into the 3000 development community.

A couple of months ago, HP in its infinite wisdom decided that my services were no longer necessary. My last day of employment there was April 18.

Please delete mark.bixby@hp.com from your address books, lest the other Mark Bixby who still works at HP (yes, there were two of us) starts getting e-mail intended for me.

So HP may still have a Mark Bixby, but the community knows the vendor doesn't employ the Mark Bixby. And since HP is dropping its 3000 operations, having the Mark Bixby outside of HP is a very good thing for your community, even if his work will revolve around a new platform solution. See, there's that MPE/iX repository, now working along with QSS founder Duane Percox's early support of OpenMPE.

Bixby has a helpful repository of his 3000 work at his own Web site, bixby.org

Six years, five months, and forecasts for futures

This week the 3000 community will move into the month that signals six-and-a-half years of the 3000's Transition Era. It has been a period filled with dread, hope, opportunity and change. A good deal of all that was predicted from the very first day of Transition, but some events were not. 3000 owners who need to forecast events for the next 77 months, now that the first 77 have passed, can start by reviewing what's come to pass from predictions and what has not, and why.

On November 14, 2001, the day of HP's announcement of ending its 3000 operations, ERP and MANMAN advisor Cortlandt Wilson looked into his crystal ball and saw these events:

Up until Jan 1, 2007 service parts should be available from HP just as they are now. After that I expect that HP will continue it’s policy of selling service parts on a “best, available” basis.

Not only accurate, but accurate-plus: HP still offers parts and service on its support throughout this year, two more than HP figured. Also as predicted, the third party market and the vast field of identical HP 9000 hardware has made parts a non-issue to go forward with a 3000.

Q: Is it possible that someone will take over support of MPE/iX after HP stops support in 2006?
A. Yes. In fact the conversations are already well underway.  I was in on a phone call between HP and members of Interex’s MPE Forum just yesterday where that topic was discussed at some length.

We wish we could say this one was forecast accurately, but that swap-over front has moved slower than forecast. HP's decision on support for MPE/iX, tied to licensing source for some, outlasted Interex and that MPE Forum. The timing still seems to be tied to end of HP support. It's important to remember that HP made its discontinuance announcement from two spokesmen: Then-GM Winston Prather, and Jim Murphy, the latter notably of HP Support.

But HP did follow through on what it did promise for improving system, as predicted.

Wilson took a look forward on the dark November day for the 3000 and saw more HP work in the future.

It looks to me like HP is planning to go ahead and roll out the hardware and software improvements that they already had in the R&D pipeline. Furthermore, MPE/iX ombudsman Jeff Vance indicated to the Interex volunteers yesterday that "if anything, the next SIB (System Improvement Ballot) will be more important than last year.

Also predicted well, since HP has more than three-score beta test patches created after 2001, all waiting for general release.

Systems have flowed through the marketplace, more than four years after HP stopped selling the 3000.

I expect the already flourishing used systems market to continue to be there for many years. I
would add a caveat here. I would expect the used systems to be available after 2003, but perhaps not at the current prices.

Those prices are better than ever, and supply meets demand even for the latest class of 3000.

Most important to today's forecasters, Wilson's prediction of the 3000's utility have come true and continue well beyond the date everyone worked toward more than six years ago.

I don’t believe that saying that the HP e3000 is “dead” is an accurate description of the situation.  For some users today’s announcement may be one more reason to leave the HP e3000.  But many of you have looked at the options and have decided to stick with MANMAN and the HP e3000.  If that decision made sound business sense yesterday, I suggest that it probably still does today. And it may still make sense come January 1, 2007.

Or on April 14, 2008, too. Each company can migrate in its own time.

No joke: The wrong HP computer?

Perhaps we can file today's entry under History, too, because it promotes a Hewlett-Packard that is gone for the 3000 owner who's not considering a migration. HP has put together a series of TV ads that hawk its HP Financing as part of a "HP Total Care" package. The ad looks like it's part of a campaign selling HP PCs; it's hard to believe that the HP Integrity servers would ever spark such a slick advertisement.

HP drew customers' attention to the joke (not an April Fool's gag) in its HP Technology at Work newsletter. The ad, like so many, is posted up on You Tube, in hopes of the Tube lending some viral marketing oomph to the message. You can have a look yourself. It's probably funnier if your company has a constant future in the Hewlett-Packard fold.

 

You can certainly believe after having a look at the ad that HP has a marketing message that includes the idea that any other computer than the ones it sells is the wrong computer. On the other hand, HP's Financing might be available for non-HP products. Or not. HP knows humor sells, plus it needs to have a direct message at the end of the joke:

Watch and laugh at this YouTube video and discover to what lengths companies will go to finance their technology. See what life would be like without HP.

Support, financing, training, all the little squares in the ad's direct message (click it for a detailed picture), these are still available from the vendor if a company is investing in HP's 3000 alternatives. The message might sting a little for the company that has not migrated and feels like it needs to run a car wash to finance their computer purchases. The subtle nudge is that a company without IT financing is in real trouble, or just someone to spark a laugh.

Of course, many of those options are available from outside of HP, from independent providers — even for the HP 3000 owner. It's a good idea not to take marketing too seriously. We can laugh here in our company, because the alternative won't get us anywhere.

Oh, and HP Financial Services racked up $642 million in loan activity in the first quarter of 2008. Nothing wrong with that, so long as the company that's not washing cars understands the HP Total Care benefits will benefit the Hewlett-Packard profit numbers. HPFS wrote 17 percent more loans in '08 in Q1 than in '07, and the easy financing made $43 million of profit in the first quarter alone.

That'll pay for a few TV commercials. HP certainly doesn't need a car wash. But life without HP need not require car washes and bake sales. What is it like? Maybe less smug, maybe not as funny. There's no comic commericals to promote life without Hewlett-Packard.

Whose life is ending, and when

You hear the phrase "end of life" a lot in the 3000 community. Usually it's Hewlett-Packard talking about its HP 3000 product. It's as if once HP stops supporting the system and working on MPE/iX, then the server is dead.

We also hear "end of life" from some partners in the HP 3000 community, especially those with a heavy migration quota to fill. By heavy quota I mean a lack of business such a partner can conduct with a customer who won't migrate anytime soon.

Come to think of it, that's really the perspective HP seems to approach every time the vendor uses phrases like "as the 3000 comes to its end of life." Whatever is ending, it's unlikely to be the HP 3000 use at a good number of good HP customers. If that were not true, then HP would say its 3000 support will reach its end of life, without a doubt in 2010.

Products outlive their creators. A user group sprang up in the 1980s to support the beloved Osborne PCs, after the company that created them had gone belly-up in 1983. The First Osborne Group (FOG) held their system and its included software close to their hearts, long after Osborne fell to the competition of Apple and Kaypro.

Ancient history, some might say, adding that the market is completely different 20 years later. But the customers aren't that different. Keep in mind that the 1980s is the time when many of the strongest HP 3000 advocates and its most durable customers adopted the 3000. For these companies, the end of life that's approaching soonest is not for a server that runs well in their enterprises and is supported by a growing third party ecosystem.

Not only does this "end of life" concept fly in the face of customer habit, it is also difficult to predict or track. HP said at its latest appearance at the GHRUG meeting that migrations are winding down now. The attendees were thus enticed to surmise that being un-migrated meant they were behind the majority of 3000 owners.

Robelle has pledged to keep its HP 3000 business running through 2016. Vesoft, which still can count on several thousand support-paying customers, won't even discuss an end of life date for its business. Adager, The Support Group, Pivital and the many hardware resources — you won't hear them talking about the 3000's end of life.

No one can dispute that the field of 3000 owners is dwindling in size. That makes for opportunity for the partners who sell migration solutions. This is the ecosystem that HP dreamed up when it started one end of life in 2001: The end of its HP 3000 business. It's not hard to imagine, given the FOG-like support for the 3000 concept: A computer designed to run for years without need for repurchase, upgrade or extra expense.

Systems offered today have a certain end of life, planned by their makers, who have a follow-on product in design and test even while the older systems sell well. We're careful to call HP's ending its "exit from the community," a group that will still be using the systems to efficient effect, years after HP ends its 3000 life.

Discount is departing for HP's Universe

HP will wrap up its $400 discount this week off its Software Universe, a relatively new conference about even newer HP-branded software. The Universe is held at the same time as the HP Technology Forum; the Universe meeting is just down Las Vegas Boulevard at the Venetian Hotel. Register by the end of this week (April 4) and the cost is $1,495. (An HP e-mail from this morning has the price at $100 lower than the cost on HP's Web site.)

HP called this mid-June week the Trifecta last year while promoting the conference, because it takes place in the same city and week as the HP StorageWorks conference and the Technology Forum. Even with all available discounts, attending all the conferences — and therefore maximizing your travel training time — will cost about $3,000. (Of course, being in two places at once might require more than one IT staff member, unless you're nimble or cherry-picking agendas.)

The Software Universe sessions and keynotes can be important if your company is taking a step into a large installation of HP's Unix, or an HP-based Windows solution. A very high percentage of what's showcased at the Universe as a solution is HP-branded, or from a close HP partner such as Oracle or SAP. Big-site stuff, some of this architecture serves. The standards tools can be a good bedrock for midsize companies, too.

HP created the Software Universe by combining its own HP Software meeting with an existing Mercury Interactive conference. HP purchased Mercury in 2006, when it paid $4.5 billion for the company. The most significant offering from what has become known as HP Mercury can be found on the HP Business Technology Optimization site. This is where the HP intelligence in the ITIL standards resides and grows.

HP is calling the discount which ends this week Winter Pricing, and the price tag is $100 below what you will find on the Software Universe Web site.

The conference runs concurrent with the Technology Forum down at the Mandalay Bay, wrapping up with another Thursday night party. As for the specific content, it's still being firmed up, with details expected by mid-April. Official sales of the sponsorship spaces are only ending today. But even at $1,495, HP says the price is a bargain.

Our informative Mainstage sessions, educational track sessions, and invaluable Solution Center are alone valued at more than $5,000. We estimate that an IT professional would need to attend more than a dozen webinars to be exposed to the amount of product knowledge attendees have access to during HP Software Universe. Add in the Partner Showcase, HP Roundtables, and Product Roadmap sessions, and the numerous networking opportunities, and the value is high for any person or team working to optimize the business value of IT.

HP adds that the Universe is recommended for "technical staff supporting their organizations' implementation of HP Software products," and that's really the long and short of it. If your enterprise is planning to use HP's software along with the vendor's environment, this can be a useful meeting to attend.

 

Migration: Not just a 3000 project

HP 3000 users are not alone among migrators in the Hewlett-Packard world. The top two alternatives to the system, from HP's point of view, also bear migration concerns. Windows and HP-UX environment customers both faced migration messages this week.

Users of the more popular target among HP 3000 migration sites, Windows, are listening for what Microsoft will do about the expiration date for Windows XP. The seven-year-old environment is being dropped by Microsoft in favor of Vista, an operating system which has had just 20 percent adoption in one year's time. A remarkably low number, considering how many new PCs ship only with Vista.

Microsoft has told large computer makers such as HP to stop selling XP as of the end of June. This deadline, like the one HP stated for its HP 3000 support, has already been extended once, from January 1 of this year. A CNET news article supposes that Microsoft is not far away from extending the sales deadline for XP once again.

Then there's HP-UX, the proprietary Unix which HP's Alvinia Nishimoto described as a popular choice for the migrating customers which HP tracks. Just today the Encompass user group, in cooperation with HP, started surveying about why users are "either planning or actively migrating your environment to Integrity or another platform." So away from PA-RISC Unix or MPE, but on to something other than HP's Unix? Encompass wants to know more.

The invitation to take the survey is entitled "HP-UX Migration Plan Checkpoint Survey," with nary a mention of HP 3000 or MPE/iX. This is about moving on from HP's Unix.

As you continue in planning and migrating your environment, we would like to check in with a quick 5-minute survey. As always we value your inputs which help us focus and prioritize on areas of importance to our customers.

HP 3000 customers might want to overlook the "As always" part of the last sentence, since at the moment the vendor isn't focusing on input from the OpenMPE advocacy group. But that's another issue. The HP-UX Migration Plan survey wants to know how many of the following systems will be the target of a migration away from HP 9000 HP-UX (HP9000) servers:

• HP-UX on HP Integrity
• Linux on HP Integrity
• Windows on HP Integrity   
• OpenVMS on HP Integrity
• Linux on HP ProLiant   
• Windows on HP ProLiant   
• UNIX on HP ProLiant   
• UNIX on non-HP servers   
• Linux on non-HP servers   
• Windows non-HP servers

At least the questions are ranked in order of HP's most proprietary solutions, and OpenVMS is included. The survey asks if availability of current applications meet a customer's needs in migration to Integrity. The number of Integrity apps, based on the Itanium architecture, were an issue while HP was ramping up its Integrity (Itanium-based offerings).

HP/Encompass asks "What are your primary criteria for selecting a migration target platform:

• Relationship with vendor
• Quality/reliability
• Highest performance
• Best price/performance   
• Lowest cost/price   
• Availability of applications   
• Compatibility with current systems   
• Power consumption/footprint

Finally, the user group serving HP's enterprise customers wants to know which of these considerations will drive the choice of a target platform

• Application or data center consolidation
• Implement a Service Oriented Architecture
• Scale-Out deployment
• Implementing server virtualization
• Deploying blade servers
• Migration to HP-UX v3

You can take the survey yourself if you're moving off HP-UX on PA-RISC. Everybody who participates gets a chance in a drawing for "HP logo Travel Gear." We got a swell backpack with the HP logo during our visit to last year's Technology Forum, without even travelling away from HP-UX.

What you own is not what you purchased

At last week's GHRUG International Technology Conference, HP reminded the community that nobody owns MPE/iX but HP. Owns it forever, even if you bought a server because you believed MPE/iX was bundled, added value of a great operating system and database. No, your money was spent on a license, not software.

At GHRUG, HP's e3000 business manager Jennie Hou confirmed the clear intention that HP will cede nothing but "rights" to the community after HP exits the 3000 business."The publisher or copyright owner still owns the software," Hou said when license requirements beyond 2010 were discussed. "You didn't purchase MPE/iX. You purchased a right to use it."

See the presentation slide below (by clicking to get a larger view) for the exact HP wording.

It looks like HP's statement about licensing, announced in the dark holiday week of December 2005, must be re-evaluated. Not that it was untrue, but consider what it amounts to. It's a mystery how HP can give any significant use of MPE/iX to third parties in the years after the vendor won't offer services for the 3000 community. A third party owns nothing under these rules, but should build a business model and employ experts on this basis? Risky business, that.

A third party will just have to hope to rely on access to MPE/iX source. And nothing else but hope. In any contract no better than a typical customer's, a support firm would own nothing but that Right To Use what HP owns. Support for the third party support supplier for MPE/iX from HP? Shut down, by 2010. Support suppliers could consider that deal a sketchy foundation to build a business upon.

The 3000 community can only hope that's not HP's intention for support providers: To make any alternative support for the 3000 community remain sketchy. HP retains its ownership, but the intention of this 2005 announcement was to "help partners" do support business. Here's that HP 2005 statement, as a reminder of Hewlett-Packard's intentions.

When HP no longer offers services that address the basic support needs of remaining e3000 customers, HP intends to offer to license HP e3000 MPE/iX source code to one or more third parties — if partner interest exists at that time — to help partners meet the basic support needs of the remaining e3000 customers and partners.

If this sounds dour, the update was at least a disappointment for any community member bringing expectations to the GHRUG meeting. HP has refused, according to community sources familiar with the matter, to budget any monies for the source code project until at least November, 2010. That's right: the word we heard is that the work that only HP can do to put MPE/iX into the community didn't make it onto the 2008 budget, and won't make it into 2009's spending, either.

We would love to be corrected on this last point by HP, or at least learn of a change of its strategy. Because if the report is right, it means that Hewlett-Packard is not doing the right thing for any companies which won't be migrated by the end of October, 2010. Hundreds to thousands of companies, according to our reports from HP's partners. Despite HP's statement at the conference that migration activity is "now on the down-slope," we hear very different reports from customers both large and small. Something is on the down-slope in HP's 3000 view, to be sure, but it's not the work of moving off the HP 3000.

If HP gets to work late in 2010 on source code transfer, that's late enough to consider the project a non-starter — as well as a surreptitious turnabout from HP's intention in 2005 to enable your community to continue with MPE/iX servers.

To be clear, we heard that HP plans to shut down all of its public 3000 operations just 60 days into the HP 2010 budget. We're at a loss to figure who inside HP could do enough preparation for MPE/iX transfer in what will be less than eight weeks' time. By November of 2009, the HP 3000 lab will already have been closed for 10 months. Workarounds and site-specific patches are all that will be done.

Business sometimes includes no fairness. But conduct with a community should be built on justice. HP has long maintained that your money paid for support has no business funding any work inside HP's development labs. Forget if that is fair. Think about whether it seems a just act to receive revenues this year, with no regard for how a longtime partner — the customer — will fare after a supplier closes the doors.

 

Some people buy insurance for peace of mind, with no intention of using it. HP's support customers get access to untested enhancements and fixes for their money. By the end of this year, third party support gets better than anything HP offers to the customer at large.

Any community members who need HP to finish its end-game work, by beginning to reveal specifics now, should consider this kind of justice about maintenance. Especially when they consider the question of maintaining a relationship with a vendor who has one last proprietary environment — HP-UX and HP Integrity servers — which it means to sell you as a 3000 replacement.

Remember, you're not purchasing HP-UX, just a right to use it. And every vendor-specific product has an end-game. Watch what HP does right now with the HP 3000 and MPE/iX in the vendor's end-game.

What HP has to say for itself

In a little more than 40 minutes last week, HP's talked about the 3000 division's future for the remaining work on the system. We reported the math for HP e3000 business manager Jennie Hou at her talk. Less than 41 weeks remain before HP's 3000 development of any kind will end. That's scant time to finish so many tasks, like release of 3000 enhancements long-finished but untested, or HP preparation for turning over the care of MPE/iX to the community.

HP is going to release a PowerPatch 5 to its support customers during 2008. The company will also "provide clear guidelines for performing hardware upgrades." These were the only plans HP announced for the rest of this year. There will be no further PowerPatches for 6.5 and 7.0 MPE/iX releases. (The individual 6.5/7.0 patches can be downloaded by the entire community.) That's all HP plans to do.

Click on the slide at the right to see the sparse plans for the remainer of 2008.

Those unreleased beta-test patches are in limbo, unless HP has confidential plans it didn't share at GHRUG. A pledge to deploy "a very aggressive plan to put together a program for beta test patches" was entirely without details. HP still puts the plan in the hands of customers, a community loath to change much on frozen systems.

Customers and partners in the audience asked if HP would reduce its beta-test requirements to get dozens of fixes and enhancements into the community. Beta-test is a status restricted to HP support customers. No, HP did not report it would do this for the six dozen software projects that it has built and tested since 2004.

Instead, the audience got a repeat performance. Hou, speaking on behalf of HP management, repeated the "virtual" HP 3000 division was "investigating" one need or another. In HP's process of delivering anything to the community, "investigation" is only the first step of a process that includes "funding" and then "planning" and finally "development." Oh, and the testing, if needed. Many HP projects have never gone beyond investigation.

For a list of what's still in limbo, across three releases of MPE/iX, have a look at HP's roundup on what needs to be tested and released in 41 weeks' time.

Houston echoes community's streaks

While the Houston Rockets were winning their 21st NBA game in a row up the road, another streaking community held court at a campus known for its rockets. The University of Houston-Clear Lake boasted a legendary aeronautics program and hosted the Greater Houston RUG (GHRUG)  International Technology Conference. The meeting marked the 38th straight year that the HP 3000 community gathered face-to-face. It was also the fifth year of meetings since HP halted its 3000 sales.

In Houston, another streak remained intact. For the sixth straight springtime, HP did not offer details for its 3000 endgame issues, such as source-code licensing and the elease of beta test patches. HP's 3000 labs now have less than 41 weeks remaining to complete work on the operating system before closing up.

However, HP did not confirm that the virtual HP 3000 will vanish at the end of 2008. The question was asked during an HP update session about the 3000 — a computer platform which wasn't the only system that GHRUG speakers addressed.

GHRUG maintained a two-conference streak on keynote speakers, hearing Adager's Alfredo Rego launch the second day of the meeting for the second straight conference. "I am not going to try to convince you of anything here, but just to tell some stories for your benefit," he said. But the HP 3000 advocate did arrive at the meeting with a copy of the latest Entertainment Weekly, which featured an older Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones on the cover, along with the headline, "Why He's Still Hot." Like the HP 3000, this is a story the audience won't grow tired of hearing.

Rego shared his research on Ford, pointing out a few things the star has in common with the HP 3000.

"I am like old shoes," Rego quoted Ford. "I have never been hip. I have never been enough in fashion to be replaced by something new."

Understanding chuckles rose up from the early morning crowd. "It reminds me of the HP 3000," Rego said.

Talk at the conference did not run to details on the latest Right To Use license language, or where the business model might come from for a hardware emulator. OpenMPE didn't even give a presentation, but HP did offer both Alvinia Nishimoto and Jennie Hou as 3000-related speakers.

And maybe most important, for the future of the event, was the 100-plus participants who arrived for two lunches, two breakfasts and one impromptu cookout. GHRUG is going onward with this event, bolstered by 42 talks across two days of networking.

Nishimoto detailed HP's view of the migration away from the 3000. HP-UX, she said, is the target platform most favored by migration sites. she chalked up the choice to one 3000 essential tool: Robelle's Suprtool. The software isn't available on Windows and is in wide use in the 3000 community.

HP's quotes went as far back as 1995 to cover satisfied customers who'd migrated. Windows is stable enough, too. Windows is being driven by packaged applications.

OpenMPE didn't update its plans or progress at the meeting, but asked pointed questions in the HP presentations. Emulator projects didn't come up, either. But attendees could learn more about using Network Attached Storage with a 3000, or a Baker's Dozen tips on working with HP 3000s. More on those tomorrow.

What can HP say today?

The Greater Houston RUG International Technology Conference opens today. HP is scheduled to give an update about its HP 3000 strategy and plans for 2007-08. Since 2007 is well behind us, it might be more productive to focus on what HP could report on its plans for 2008 and beyond.

I figure the news that relates to the customers will offer these highlights of HP's e3000 work for the coming year:

1. Deliver MPE/iX 7.5 PowerPatch 5

2. Produce continuity/connectivity white papers & limited enhancements for:

• Peripherals
• Storage
• Networking

3. Provide market with clear guidelines and access to:

• Hardware upgrades
• MPE/iX RTU licenses
• Remarketed systems & parts
• Add-on software

4. Continue with partner and user communications & engagements

• Ongoing engagement with the OpenMPE Board and other partners
• Providing communications through appropriate forums or vehicles

Those clear guidelines in Section 3 may only be news to the 3000 site which is upgrading. Such sites may include the migration customer who needs several more years of performance from the HP 3000 installation. Or an upgrade customer could be a homesteader with no plan to migrate, or one who scrapped a plan. Some sites need a better deal for faster systems that HP cannot offer — because your vendor will not unlock the horsepower of the latest 3000 systems.

HP has many more hardware systems and environments to offer than faster 3000s or a limited enhancement to MPE/iX.. The vendor can hardly get all the replacement options onto one PowerPoint slide (see above, and click to get a larger, legible view.) But HP could say more today, about its end-game strategies (those were supposed to be done by now, until HP decided last summer to extend its business once more) and its intention to let the community take charge of the 3000's value.

HP has said something, in an FAQ file written about its Right To Use licenses. Those "clear guidelines" arrive in response to the recent SSPWD software from Advant/IRS, although HP won't connect its rewritten RTU FAQ language to SSPWD.

Let me shift into editorial mode here for a moment. This may get long, but I beg your patience.

There is one phrase in the new RTU FAQ document that speaks to the heart of HP's 3000 intentions, as I see them after 23 years of writing about the company. From the latest FAQ about the RTU licences:

"Possible violations of the MPE/iX RTU policy are not limited to the scenarios listed above."

There's nothing minor about that. It reads as a strong warning or a threat, perhaps. There's nothing in last year's RTU FAQ which comes close to this sentence. It deserves its own paragraph in the 2008 FAQ. HP could say more about this at the Greater Houston RUG meeting. A wide-open attempt at prohibition deserves explanation. How else to show the community the value in playing by HP's new rules?

See, SSPWD purports to give a customer access to the crucial ss_update routines in MPE/iX. These are tools to modify stable storage. You can change an HPSUSAN 3000 ID number with those tools, or make much more drastic revisions of a 3000’s personality. It’s little wonder HP wants a strong message about stable storage practices.

Nobody wants to see this FAQ sentence go into legal battles, but I believe the statement will not stand up in a court unless someone has signed a new license. Court was once a battleground for HP in similar matters. This community still remembers HP going to court over the HP 3000's stable storage, investigating by using public law enforcement officials, some of whom had close ties to HP Security, and then succeeding in having resellers and partners fined and convicted. Lo-jack bracelets, for some, went onto ankles of partners.

But with SSPWD now available for third party support companies to use, it looks like it will act as a lockword-breaking program to uncover passwords for ss_update. This is the community taking steps to get what it needs. I remember HP saying to the 3000 community that the vendor will unlock HP diagnostics software for the 3000. Making a promise to do that three years ago, and it's still undone. I assume that HP doesn’t consider ss_update as a diagnostic, of course

But really, how long should HP run out this clock with new licenses and FAQ warnings? Whose future is at stake here, other than the HP Services group, which continues to collect revenue for such services? It might be a small company's future at stake, one which cannot afford to migrate and then has an 3000 CPU board fail overnight. They'll need ss_update the next morning. It takes a very creative and business-toughened view to see these new licenses and "possible violations" as being in the interest of this type of 3000 owner.

While I visited the HP 3000 group one afternoon, former business manager Dave Wilde and I went to lunch  — and he said the group wants to give the system "the ending that it deserves." It sounded warm and genuine. Consider that ending to be HP's, though, not the system's or the community's. The vendor's exit is just one more milepost on the 3000's highway. Large customers are going on beyond HP's end of support business, no matter how long HP Services wants to string it out.

Maybe we can leave it to the French to lead the way here. I just read today about an aspect of French law which does not exist in US law. It's called "droit moral," meant to protect the moral rights of ownership of a work of art. Even more than HP's support group, the 3000 community considers MPE/iX to be a work of art, I believe. From a story about using droit moral:

One notion of French law that doesn't exist in the U.S. is the ownership of "droit moral" or moral right. This is an intellectual right of an artist to protect his work. When an artist dies, the "droit moral" goes to his heirs unless he appoints someone else. For example, a John Huston movie was colorized in the U.S., and the movie is shown this way in the States despite the opposition of the Huston heirs who are trying to honor their father's artistic wishes. But in France, where the Huston heirs argued their father didn't want his film to be in color, the colorized film can't be shown because of droit moral.

To some HP 3000 owners, HP will die, in their eyes, once 2008 is over and no more patches are being built. There are HP's intellectual rights to the property called the HP 3000, but there are moral rights, too. This computer would not be the keystone that it still is at places like aircraft makers and airline ticket agencies without the community's contributions, many years ago and still today. In fact, HP recognizes this kind of help in the market with the e3000 Contributor of the Year Award.

I believe that to honor droit moral for the 3000 community, HP's increasingly restrictive statements of licensing need to stop. The vendor's support group needs to move on to other profitable markets and leave this group of owners and customers to continue using this computer, without extra payments to HP. I know Hewlett-Packard is still spending on the 3000 — but apparently so little that it cannot budget for a MPE/iX transfer project through fiscal 2008, and probably not through fiscal 2009, either. Those are budget choices which do not extend much good will, in my opinion, to such loyal customers. These companies signed on years ago for a value proposition and vendor faith which some of them cannot see anymore.

Some in the community understand how customers might be confused about who will have the moral right to what in a few years — the day when HP is finished collecting revenues in support and passing the profits down to HP's bottom line. I feel sad when I think of the good and loyal 3000 advocates, people who did as much as they could within HP's limits to help this system stay in HP's lineup. It seems that now they must make the corporate bottom line needs of HP come first. I am struggling to see this as "the ending the 3000 deserves."

HP Support keeps quiet about futures

To be accurate this entry should be filled under No News Outta HP. But at least we have located a  source of information about HP's support plans for the HP 3000.

Last month Bernard Determe, HP Worldwide Support Planning Manager, spoke to HP partners about the 3000 futures. He was one of several speakers in an EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) briefing, and the only representative listed from HP's Services arm, where product support survives for the system.

We say survives because for two extensions now the support business has been extended beyond original HP end dates for the platform. We wanted to interview Determe about HP's policy for creating and distributing patches for MPE/iX during 2009. HP's Jennie Hou has said the company will develop no more 3000 patches in about nine months' time. Determe's division is responsible for collecting revenue from the 3000 community for this no-more-patch service.

Alas, HP is holding back on its future support information until sometime in the future. Judy Erkanat, Public Relations Manager for the Technology Solutions Group Worldwide Marcom, wrote back to reply to our request:

We will pass on your offer of an interview at this time, but look forward to working with you in the future. We wanted you to know that HP is committed to continued support of HP e3000 installations. Limited HP Support for e3000 servers has been extended through December 2010 to best meet the needs of our customers and partners.

We're well-informed about that extension, but a bit puzzled on what purchasing HP support during 2009 will bring to a customer. It's a newsman's job to ask for interviews. Sometimes the answer is "not just now." That brings HP support into step with the 3000 virtual division, which has been saying "not just now" to requests for source code licensing schedules. Support, however, has been a primary motivator in that schedule, we believe.

It is disappointing to learn that Bernard and the Technology Solutions Group believes  it must wait until some later date to talk to us. Here in the 3000 community there’s a growing belief, among customers and HP partners, that the Support group is now determining HP’s e3000 futures policy.

The belief only makes sense, since HP will cease creating patches for the community in nine months. Revenues and profits drive policy decisions. (There are liabilities to consider, too, just another aspect of HP's timeline. But legal exposure is probably less important than what HP continues to collect from customers for the corporate bottom line.) What else but support still generates dollars for HP from the 3000 community, except the new Right to Use License and those $400 license transfer fees? Support contracts continue to bring in millions of dollars, by our estimates.

Which services will be offered next year are on customers’ minds. A few days after we asked for our HP Support interview, we talked to an e3000 customer who is considering a 3000 migration to HP Industry Standard Servers. The customer called us to confirm if HP will use third party companies during 2009 to deliver support under HP contracts. The customer’s migration will not be complete by January 1, 2009.

I had no answer for this man except, “HP has not made that third party plan public at this time.” He will continue to call around, since his board of directors wants the answer.

This is the sort of support topic that HP could let us all know about. We appreciate getting some answer to our interview request, however, even if it’s “not now.”

I look forward to hearing from the part of Hewlett-Packard which is still collecting revenues from HP’s e3000 customers. As 2009 approaches, our articles about HP will focus more on HP’s support policies with every passing month. We can only offer our space and access to the community. HP’s job is to offer the information, answers to questions such as "when will 3000 support from the vendor cease?"

HP researches way to make Labs pay

Hewlett-Packard is one of the eldest statesmen in the computer community, a fact which bred the HP 3000 community's success with MPE/iX and the PA-RISC hardware. There was a time when HP took regular risks with basic research, the kind which does not always pay off in products. Computing was once driven by basic research to make leaps in technical ability.

Those risks are now rare among the major vendors of the computer community, but HP seems willing to steer its science toward enterprise computing more than it has in its recent past. Tomorrow the vendor announces a revival of HP Labs, the legendary research arm that created marvels such as cutting-edge ink technology and the chip designs which launched the HP 3000's current generation, as well as the latest HP Integrity servers.

HP Labs is one of few basic research groups still standing on the 21st Century computer landscape. IBM still operates the Almaden Research Center. Xerox's PARC center closed many years ago. HP Labs celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2006. Its Bristol, England arm extended HP's prowess in storage devices back when the HP 3000 was peaking at its largest installed base. Precision Architecture Reduced Instruction Set Computing — PA-RISC — grew up in the HP Labs.

The Labs need to be more product-oriented to survive the current bottom-line management scrutiny at HP. Projects which move to products are important to HP's migrating HP 3000 customers. Hewlett-Packard once relied on innovation first and standards second to capture and keep its customers. Some migrating customers who choose HP need assurance that the vendor will do more than the best possible integration of components for Industry Standard Servers. ISS provides the growth in HP's Business Critical Systems unit. But it's the Integrity line of RISC systems — which use HP's innovation of Itanium architecture — that must bolster the future HP-UX.

The revival of the Labs could be a sign that HP remains willing to keep up the innovation that an HP Unix platform is going to need. Without that kind of built-here-first engineering, HP's customers have to hunt harder for reasons to keep using solutions that lock users in HP's technology. CEO Mark Hurd is hosting tomorrow's event, a signal that Hewlett-Packard is willing to give its scientists room to run up bills, spending aimed at delivering knockout computing choices.

The Labs are now being run by Prith Banerjee, who left his post as dean of the college of engineering at the University of Illinois last summer. While the 46-year-old has earned scientific awards since those days when HP's RISC first became a product, Banerjee is said to have an eye on keeping the Labs pointed toward product-based research.

Soon-to-market products would be an innovation in the Labs. On the home page of the Labs' Web site, the group is promoting a science-fiction innovation: Painless injections using an HP skin patch. HP extended its printer designs several years ago to be able to create human skin with micro-needles that deliver smart doses of drugs. It's an alternative safer than being stuck with a needle, HP says, as well as a better skin patch which Irish firm Crospon hopes to sell by 2010.

The HP 3000 customers who stick with HP will want something less organic for their computing, of course. When HP introduced Banerjee as the Labs director, the vendor said his research interests "are in parallel and distributed computing, compilers, and VLSI computer-aided design."

All that sounds much closer to what the 3000 customer needs when choosing HP-UX and Integrity servers. Strong compilers are still crucial to the RISC computing process. Of course, as Labs director Banerjee won't be doing this work himself. But reports say that he's shelving some projects in the Labs in the reorganization that leads to tomorrow's revamp announcement. Pushing smart skin underneath the needs of a computer company would seem to flow from such shelving.

Banerjee has his own history of entrepreneur practices. In 2000 he founded AccelChip, a developer of software for building digital-signal processing (DSP) systems, which was sold in 2006 year to Xilinx. HP 3000 customers may remember that former HP business computing chief Wim Roelandts became Xilinx CEO after leaving HP.

The Labs still has some impact to deliver for the customer sticking with HP's computing. Recent projects cover developing computer chip circuitry to the atomic scale, software to automate data centers, and a utility computing center, where customers can get computing power based on changing needs.

Becoming big: a task to grab by the tail

    I can’t imagine a world where the Web doesn’t play a big role in success. But as IT pros, you know better than to believe any computing tool always delivers as expected. Downtime, mistaken design; these life lessons become experience and then wisdom. Somehow the Internet seems to escape this skepticism, since it connects us in innovative ways. We’re all counting on the Web like gravity, government forms, and mergers designed make organizations bigger and better. Smaller is supposed to be weaker, in that last model.

   This month a few bigger-is-better alliances have been put in play. Microsoft and the HP user group Encompass both want to be bigger, adding allies. Microsoft made a $44 billion bid for Yahoo, a deal nearly double the size of the HP-Compaq merger of 2002. Microsoft might have sledding ahead of it just as tough as Hewlett-Packard's merger. HP CEO Carly Fiorina battled an angry, nearly equal share of stockholders to push through her merger back in 2002. It looks like Yahoo might push back with as much force, saying the record-breaking offer is undervalued for an information content provider.

   Much has been made about this deal being a way for Microsoft to keep up with Google. A few years ago Yahoo was compared to Google in the pages of Wired. That was long before Google was trading above $500 a share.

   The merger tussle reminds me of the days when HP was working to adopt Compaq, a company which had fallen from its heyday as Yahoo has now. At least Fiorina had Compaq’s board in her pocket when HP did its big grab. Yahoo is pushing back already, so expect another messy fight. Not so with the Encompass alliance and its new user group partners.

    It took HP CEO Fiorina’s firing and more than three years to make the HP purchase “a good earner,” as they say in the wiseguy movies. I wonder what Microsoft will need to succeed.

    Mergers can be delicate operations, attempts to embrace each other which the Web is expected to enable. Encompass and its two new partners, Interex Europe and the ITUG group, see the Web’s social networking tools as a way to attract younger members. The new Endeavor group wants to create community instead of an association. The latter sounds aged, while the former sounds fun.

    One Encompass director pointed out that the merger of corporations is very different from making allies out of user groups. Chris Koppe talked of mergers “being one of those things where somebody decides to buy somebody else. User groups don’t come together as quickly, but I think this [association] is getting close to where we want to be. Individually it was very hard to get HP’s attention, and that model now changes going forward.”

   Being big is within reach when you can stretch across the Wide World of the Web. Using the Web as a lever to connect can deliver benefits, especially if you can be in the business of delivering the hard to find. That’s the Long Tail theory that’s made Amazon and Netflix work. Neither claims to be the biggest. But they succeed by specialization. Specialization, plus the Web, has let the NewsWire connect with your community. Perhaps social contact through the Web will let user groups, maybe Microsoft, grab you by the tail.

How little has changed in more than 3 years

Many HP 3000 community sites have stopped time since 2004, locking down configurations and implementing little change.

In this strategy, they are much like the user group conference speaker lineups and HP's own software releases for the 3000. What has changed since 2004 in HP PowerPatch releases, or in the list of speakers and topics since that year? Not very much.

In 2004 HP released PowerPatch 2 of MPE/iX 7.5. A PowerPatch is a collection of tested and released patches, shipped to HP's support customers exclusively. HP was predicting that it would release a couple of PowerPatches a year across versions 6.5, 7.0 and 7.5, starting in 2004.

Let's do the math here. Three years elapsed, to be generous, since the last 7.5 PowerPatch. So six more to be released. Two each for 6.5, 7.0 and 7.5, right? Wrong answer. Just about four years later, MPE/iX 7.5 is on PowerPatch 3, shipped in the summertime of 2006. Sometime in 2008, the release will get PowerPatch 4, according to HP reports. Not much has changed, because so few patches have passed beta testing. One more element of change might be the head count at the HP 3000 labs, or in HP Support, which distributes the PowerPatches. You can find changes in that number, to be sure.

HP has come out with two critical fixes to the IMAGE database, the SCSI pass-through driver, 300GB disk support, a new Samba release, all in that time. But no new PowerPatch since then, one of the tangible benefits of buying your support from HP instead of an independent third party firm.

As for the user group conference lineup, I was organizing my conference proceedings the other day and found the CD of proceedings from the very last Interex/Encompass conference, HP World Chicago of 2004. Only nine HP 3000 talks made their way into the content of that show:

1. Practical Migration Options: What Will Your New Environment/Community Be Like?
2. Tools to Make Your HP COBOL Applications Migration Easy
3. HP e3000 Migration Case Study: Y2K Was Just a Dress Rehearsal
4. An Introduction to .NET for MPE People
5. The TurboIMAGE to Eloquence Migration
6. HP e3000 Transition Alternatives for Moving to HP-UX
7. HP e3000 Transition Alternatives to Windows
8. Improving Your HP e3000 System Availability
9. e3000 Business Update and Feedback Session

The Practical Migration Options roundtable was moderated by Jeanette Nutsford and ScreenJet's Alan Yeo in 2004. Panel members? Jeffrey Douglas (PIR Group, IBM iSeries), Charles Finley of Transformix, Michael Marxmeier (creator of Eloquence), and HP-UX expert Christine Wong. What did they discuss?

The aim of this presentation is not to tell you where to migrate. To demonstrate the practicalities, however, a sample system will be migrated to a number of different target environments. The main aim of the presentation is to explore what you will find in those target environments.

In addition to the main presenters, a champion for each environment/community will present the reasons for choosing that particular environment as your application's new home. The session will focus on the new environment rather than the technical migration details and will look into the future to see what opportunities each environment/community can provide. Since the HP e3000 EOL announcement, the presenters have investigated and demonstrated many different migration options. This session brings together much of their experience to help you choose where you go next.

If you look over the lineup of speakers who discuss the HP 3000's issues in 2008, you will find most of the same names as 2004's: the above-named experts, plus Birket Foster and Speedware's Nicolas Fortin, all speaking then, nearly all speaking now. HP had Ross McDonald and Walt McCullough speak at the Chicago HP World show of 2004, as well as Dave Wilde. All have moved out of speaking for the 3000. McDonald gave us a rare interview by phone last year on the RTU project, but declined to speak on the latest critical IMAGE fixes. McCullough lost his spot in HP during a reorganization in 2007. Wilde moved on to another non-3000 part of the company. HP has changed its spokespeople, but not a lot else since '04.

(I found it interesting that the one speaker who has left HP, McCullough, delivered the only non-migration talk of 2004, "Improving Your HP e3000 System Availability.")

So many of the voices, and so much of the software available only through HP Support, remain the same. Companies have migrated, or gotten closer to leaving the system, to be sure. Changes to the community, however, are not easy to find. We'll have a closer look at the results of 2004's migration plans in tomorrow's entry.

Do expiring certifications cost community?

A few days ago I wrote about the benefits of certification as a trained HP 3000 professional. I thought that being a "CP," as some of the certified pros call themselves, entitled a 3000 pro to the HP PowerPatch tapes for MPE/iX, and other software.

Not so. You earn those tapes by joining HP's DSPP program for developers. Paul Edwards, the education expert who corrected me on those tapes, said he gets his hand-addressed from HP's Alvinia Nishimoto, "so I'm pretty sure those are custom tapes" that HP's putting out.

But the certification benefits? Edwards says that they are in the eye of beholder, most of the time. A CP can get mugs, shirts and hats from the HP Certified Professional store, things to carry or wear to client visits. Edwards says that since the 3000 certs are going dormant on June 1, he has until the end of May to shop.

Any certification is no better than the person who carries it; that's to say that passing a test and knowing how to solve a support problem are two different things. Incentives for taking the tests and keeping up should be the vendor's mission. Passing these things can be a real challenge.

Finding HP's benefits for remaining certified is something of a challenge, too, once you get beyond the HP CP brand store. HP summarizes them so:

HP Certified Professional Connection portal and knowledgebase

   Software download tools, including:
          ProLiant Software Maintenance Pack (SmartStart)
          Onsite Agent's Reference Set (OARS) Active
          Onsite Agent's Reference Set (OARS) Archive
          Commercial Software Support
          HP Parts Reference Guide (PRG)

    Access to exclusive training events and online training
    Discounts to training events and certification exams
    Free course material download for select certification training courses
    Regular "Tech Talk" webcasts providing updates from product engineers and other key personnel on the latest in HP technology, product and solution advancements

Participation in Confidential Disclosure Agreement(CDA) sessions at HP events
Invitations to regional, large industry events such as the HP Technology Forum and Expo, HP PartnerTRAIN, HP Tru64 UNIX Bootcamp and many more
Local "relationship events" and knowledge transfer events with HP field personnel

    Certification Program Office information line (toll free in the United States and Canada), including "Cert Alert" outgoing recorded phone messages with program updates
    Regular communication from the Certification Program Office, including program updates and alerts via e-mail
    Discounted HP Product Purchase Plan (United States and Canada only)
    Certification website and certification news items
    Access to HP Certified Professional Logo merchandise store
    The right to use program logos and branding to enhance your image in your company and with your customers

HP Q1 results impress analysts

HP reported that it earned solid profits and posted record sales during the first quarter of its 2008  fiscal year, led by solid performance in the company's laptop sales and an 11 percent sales climb in services. Services is the arm of HP which is still collecting revenues from HP 3000 customers as well as posting profits. While the 3000 totals of both represent a tiny fraction of HP's $28.5 billion in Q1 sales and $ 2.1 billion of profit, the server for which HP canceled its plans for during 2001 still drives money straight down to HP's bottom line.

HP announced that it shipped its 500 millionth printer during the quarter, a sales total that goes back 24 years from the start of the LaserJet era, and even farther back if you count the line printers of the 1980s connected to the HP 3000, such as the massive 2680s. HP said its printer and imaging unit posted a 4 percent sales increase, while PCs, enterprise servers, services and software all grew faster. Much of the Q&A with market analysts explored the future of the printer business. But overall, the market mavens were impressed with the past 90 days of HP's operations.

In a discussion with analysts after the market closed yesterday, HP updated its datacenter consolidation project, an effort which includes the MPE/iX servers which continue to service HP's needs. CEO Mark Hurd said that the magnitude of HP's data operations put the project about at the halfway point, after three years of work.

We were running the company in early 2005 on roughly 6000 applications. [CFO] Cathie Lesjak and I looked at this about a week ago; we’re running the company right now on a little more than 3000 applications. So we’re about halfway through the application consolidation.  It really starts with us with a process change, then an application consolidation and application modernization process, and then that allows us to consolidate infrastructure, and therefore close data centers.

HP had planned to get most of its consolidation completed during this year, but it appears to be running behind plans. HP expects, as do many HP 3000 migrating sites, to increase the amount of innovation it gets from every IT dollar spent by 2009. But HP isn't counting on advancing technology as much as reducing maintenance costs. Lesjak said HP expects to have a run rate savings of $1 billion by that year for the company which runs at a $110 billion rate yearly.

Maybe even more significant for the 3000 customer who's sticking with HP's Unix solutions, the vendor is turning toward an in-house sales force to bolster its distribution. HP added 2,000 salespeople to its ranks, and Lesjak said "We think we have a just superb lineup of products and capabilities. And it's frustrating to us because we, obviously, know we come to work every day and then under-distribute them in the market."

HP 3000 customers who recall the 1980s model often mark the rise of the resellers as the start of Hewlett-Packard's customer service decline. The results have been a success for the company's overall financial picture, however.

With 144,000 partners and resellers helping HP, the reseller-based model which started with those HP printers might have been maxed out, given HP's frustration with being "dramatically undercovered." The new focus on salespeople could benefit 3000 sites. For specialized solutions such as Integrity and the HP-UX environment, an HP salesperson could be the best way to ensure those products enjoy a growing base of customers, and so protect an HP-UX investment.

Much of the success in such enterprise servers appears to be coming from HP systems running Intel's Xeon processors and using Windows. When pressed, Hurd reported that unit sales growth for its Industry Standard Servers — not its Integrity/Unix solutions — was in the "high teens" of percentage for Q1.

Business Critical Systems revenues, in contrast, posted only a 1 percent increase from the first quarter of 2007. Integrity revenues were up 37 percent and now represent 75 percent of BCS revenue.

Hurd was upbeat about the quarter to come for HP. The company is increasing its prediction of earnings per share for the 10th consecutive quarter — a period which is entirely inside Hurd's tenure as CEO. "HP had a strong quarter, he said. It was characterized by balanced growth across all regions, share gains in key businesses, margin expansion, expense discipline, strong cash flow from operations, and significant share repurchases."

HP has created more than $50 billion in shareholder value during Hurd's term. Results from the period pushed the stock above the $47 per share mark, about 10 percent under the 52-week high. The HP numbers pulled up the technology sector's trading overall for the day, countering less-sunny to gloomy forecasts in recent weeks from Google, Microsoft and Cisco.

HP 3000 group tightens upgrade licenses

The Right to Use (RTU) MPE/iX licenses which HP created last spring just got tougher terms. On Feb. 18, without notice on the HP 3000 community's newsgroup or to OpenMPE list readers, HP added an upgrade policy statement which gets very specific about what HP hardware a customer can run MPE/iX upon.

In summary, only the hardware which MPE/iX was originally purchased for is a permitted target, unless a 3000 customer purchases an RTU. The statement, available from the HP e3000 Web site as a PDF file, addresses the transfer of MPE/iX to other HP servers "without prior written approval from Hewlett-Packard."

MPE/iX Fundamental Operating System (FOS) and HP database right-to-use licenses on the HP e3000 servers allow customers to use that software only on the system for which it was purchased. FOS and HP database software may not be transferred to other servers without prior written approval from Hewlett-Packard.

The most specific changes to the HP policy come in a new version of the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document about the RTU. HP has even left open possible and likely viol