Education takes up broader set of IT causes

By Birket Foster
Special Report to the NewsWire

Whoever imagined a conference agenda with the discussions on the appropriateness of using iTunes to distribute e-learning content, or open-source versus proprietary applications? How things have changed!
 
This week I’m attending the Educause conference in Denver, where I will be taking a dive into the modern world of educational computing looking at these topics and more.

The world of computing for education used to be really simple. Early HP 3000 adopters included many higher-ed and K-12 organizations. There were consortiums that were formed to build common applications iN Washington state, California and other places. The HP 3000 market had several providers that sprung up – SRN provided fundraising software, degree audits and more. Bi-Tech provided financials and many customers flocked to conferences. There were even conferences within conferences, as there was a SIG-ED track at Interex.
 
But the modern campus landscape has evolved to include massive IT infrastructures – internet, wireless, servers, secure networks, mobile computing, peer to peer file sharing, High Performance Computing, and Learning Management Systems (LMS) dot the landscape of the modern campus.

ID management with application data provisioning -- application integration for allowing the appropriate access based on role -- is the new challenge. This allows the integration of library, LMS, bookstore, cafeteria, vending systems, as well as e-mail, printing and file shares. The are lots of systems to present these credentials to. There is a need to have Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans and understand how to recover even if the servers were virtualized.

It’s interesting to see the issues, ranging from defining what a department is to the percentage increase of Adobe’s latest licenses. (It’s up to 50 percent for some colleges). There’s also been a large amount of discussion about the support for office and Windows 7 for Mac devices, especially through Safari and Firefox.

I'll have more to share as the conference unfolds.

Birket Foster is CEO of MB Foster, supplier of HP 3000 migration services and tools, as well as data management and datamart solutions. You can also follow the Educause Twitter stream by using the #EDUCAUSE09 tag.

IBM midrange users manifest new activism

IBM made a gallant effort at capturing users who pondered an HP 3000 migration seven years ago, but the alternative midrange iSeries server has seen declining share of Big Blue attentions. Now a group of iSeries (and AS400) owners, vendors and leaders are mounting an effort to make the iSeries manifest a brighter destiny. The campaign bears a striking resemblance to the OpenMPE advocacy -- with the distinction that IBM hasn't canceled the iSeries futures.

The iManifest initiative took off in the spring in Japan. What does the iSeries need that IBM sales and marketing isn't supplying? The launch manifesto doesn't call out IBM's shortcomings, but aims to rally the users to recognize their systems' value.

More widespread usage of IBM i is the best way for corporations to strengthen their management capability and business power. We have started activities to add to the user community as many new companies as possible. We ask that users renew their firm confidence and belief that IBM i is the best infrastructure available to support managerial and operational innovation.

2009 is the 20th anniversary of the iSeries family, which started when IBM migrated its System 36/38 customers to the AS400. At the same time HP was moving its HP 3000 sites to the PA-RISC 3000s and MPE/XL. iManifest is trying to ensure that HP's 3000 history doesn't repeat in a fadeout of the iSeries. The initiative recently gained new members in the iSeries chief scientist Frank Soltis, as well as the top application supplier Infor -- which owns the MANMAN customer base in the 3000 world.

Much like PA-RISC, IBM uses its own chip design to power the iSeries (now being called Series i). This POWER architecture is in its sixth generation, and Soltis is the primary creator of the architecture used in IBM's Power Systems. He's also retired from IBM after decades of toil in the technical trenches for the community.

The users of iSeries systems will remind you of that huge share of the 3000 community: Small-to-midsize companies that chose an integrated IT solution in the 1980s and '90s, only to see industry-standard choices dominate the vendor's roadmap. IBM hasn't joined iManifest; that might be tantamount to admitting the product line is in need of a spark. Over in the iSeries press, Chris Maxer of iSeries Network reports that a vendor rep in Europe has received only non-official support from IBM.

LANSA's Martin Fincham notes, "While I have no official word from IBM, I want to go on-record and say that I have personally received enthusiastic and practical support for iManifest EMEA from a number of IBM'ers around the globe. I cannot thank-you by name here, but you know who you are."

HP officials in the 3000 division were not much impressed by the future of IBM's integrated business alternative in 2002 and 2003. The decline in IT sales during 2008 and 2009 hasn't been kind to these non-standard products, and the press reports a steady drain from sales of the Series i. HP said it would weather IBM's pursuit of the HP 3000 migration crowd. Declining share would put pressure on solution suppliers such as LANSA, a forecast we heard in 2002 from then-e3000 Business Manager Dave Wilde.

As the market share becomes smaller and the prices drop, it becomes difficult to fund the marketing and sales channel to keep a vertically integrated system in place. One thing that’s going to happen is the margins will drop for a solution like the AS/400. Their sales volume will drop because of the differences. The other thing that happens is that a channel partner doesn’t want to test on as many platforms, just one or two mainstream platforms that are an easier sell.

Since then IBM has renamed the system twice, pumped two new generations of OS and architecture into the computer. It's also consolidated the division with the Unix version of the iSeries, another move that has the customer base worried. In one view, Wilde's predictions have come true, though probably on a longer timetable than HP imagined. The same extended timeline can be observed for HP 3000 migrations.

But the iSeries community isn't going gentle into any perceived good night. It's raising funds for marketing in the US. Independent software vendors like Infor and LANSA propose to market more than just applications -- and fund that vertical system's sales where IBM has not.

"The match has been struck. It just needs a little gasoline to light the bonfire," said Dan Burger writing in IT Jungle. "The manifest is IT activism. It comes from a loyal customer base that is irate about the mediocrity of IBM i marketing and is fearful that the mediocrity will creep into research, development, and sales of an outstanding product."

Had this sort of activism -- you might even call it community organization -- taken place for the HP 3000 before 2001, HP's decision to depart might have had a different timetable. Or not, based on policy and marketing beliefs like

Connect board election nears finale

The Connect user group for HP enterprise customers will close its voting for a 2010-11 board on Nov. 12. This election of directors is following a pattern HP 3000 customers will recognize from OpenMPE board voting. The number of seats open equals the number of candidates on the slate. For any company pursuing an HP 3000 migration, however, this organization has a lot to offer in networking opportunities.

In situations like an election without a contested seat, members understand their vote won't influence the outcome of the balloting. But voting will keep you engaged and more interested in what the board of directors will propose for the year to come. This year's slate of directors includes a candidate from the HP 3000 community running for re-election. Steve Davidek of the City of Sparks, Nevada is volunteering for a term that runs through 2011.

Connect members are the only people who can vote. Membership is only $50 for a year for an individual. You can cast a ballot after looking over the slate at the Connect site, then following the link to vote. 

One of the best resources Connect offers is a lively Twitter feed, managed by Kees den Hartigh. The Community Manager and an officer of a Netherlands user group, den Hartigh posts news from the HP that's the destination of HP3000 migrations, offering Unix and industry standard system updates. Follow den Hartigh on Twitter via @Connect_WW.

Connect is also building a 3000 user group community online, led by its president-elect Chris Koppe of Speedware and Speedware product manager Nick Fortin. The 3000 NewsWire's Twitter feed is part of the page, which is working to gain momentum among members. The Connect site has introduced an upgrade to the user interface for the group just last week.

3000 tools lose one, gain another UK entry

Birth and death are both parts of the 3000's ecosystem, even on the sixth anniversary of the system's World Wide Wake. The Wake was concocted by Alan Yeo of the UK-based company ScreenJet in 2003, a worldwide celebration in October of that year to mark the end of the 3000's manufacture. A half-dozen years after dozens of meetings lifted a glass to the 3000's HP lifespan, Yeo has introduced a new product for 3000 sites, while another UK company has closed its book on its programmer's environment.

First, the obituary. Whisper Technologies ended its 18-year run as a supplier of programmer tools, according to the company's founder Graham Wooley. (Tip of the hat to Duane Percox of QSS, whose development labs used Whisper's products.) The UK's Whisper built and promoted the Programmer Studio PC-based toolset, selling it as a development environment which understood exchanges with the 3000 but could be used to create programs under Windows. Robelle responded promptly with a Windows version of Qedit, and the 3000 ecosystem had a lively competition for programming tools for more than five years.

The birth was first announced at this fall's e3000 Community Meet. Yeo introduced EZ View, a tool for migrating the 3000's VPlus forms to industry-standard XML forms. As Yeo suggests in the video above, EZ View promotes a no-changes transformation of 3000 app hosting. Whatever the behavior of your 3000 apps today for the user base, EZ View will copy it faithfully to another environment so no retraining is required. At the same time, the door to .NET Windows or anything which XML supports can be opened.

At QSS, where the ghostscript/ghostpdl porting project is underway, Percox passed on this report from Wooley, who founded Whisper back in the era when the 3000's OS was called MPE XL. Wooley told Percox:

Unfortunately Whisper Technology is no more.  As the developer, Greg Sharp had looked after Whisper and Programmer Studio by himself for the last three years, but he has now moved on to other things and the company has now closed.

Meanwhile, EZ View is opening possibilities for companies who want to leave VPlus behind. While it was a good screen development tool for 3000 integration, VPlus was long ago passed by Visual Basic, and then Microsoft's Visual Studio in flexibility and industry support.

But the key to ScreenJet's new product lies in its ability to copy what the 3000 did. Users operate an app that's been through the EZ View transfer in the same way they've been using a 3000 app. The devotion to the old look and feel is important to minimize retraining. It also lets a 3000 shop test a migration step while the app remains on the 3000.

“We have the only VPlus migration product that runs on the 3000 as well," Yeo said. "You can switch to our API and the XML forms files.”

COBOL offers you can't refuse

For a 50-year-old language, COBOL seems to have a lot of new options and energies lately. Especially for 3000 customers who are making migrations, the ones looking around for their next platform and language. For millions of companies around the world, COBOL is an offer they cannot refuse.

We've recently heard from Chuck Townsend, a COBOL and modernization consultant who helped launch the software vendor LegacyJ. He recalls that LegacyJ "implemented the HP COBOL syntax, the HP Intrinsics (excluding IMAGE), the HP Macro capability and you might remember the VPlus capability as well." So LegacyJ offers a COBOL for use on platforms other than the 3000. One that claims to know something about the 3000.

Then there's ACUCOBOL-GT. It was easy to believe that ACUCOBOL would decline in favor of Micro Focus COBOL, when MF bought Acucorp in 2007. But Alan Yeo of ScreenJet reminds us that:

The ACUCOBOL product is still available, and we have migrations that are still in progress with our ACUCOBOL GUI conversion for VPlus products. In fact, Micro Focus are adapting that technology as the Thin Client GUI for the Micro Focus COBOL products. Like the 3000, rumours of ACUCOBOL's death appear premature.

Now that Micro Focus owns the product, it may not be as easy to ask for ACUCOBOL by name, but the GT suite still appears for sale on the Micro Focus Web site. What's even more interesting at that MF site is a pep talk by analyst Dale Vecchio of Gartner, above. The research VP comes across as a consigliere (mob elder statesman) in a six-minute sermon about why retirements are good for IT's future. He seems to invoke that image with his comparison of IT practices and the methods of The Sopranos.

Let's be clear about why Vecchio is speaking in the 6-minute video at the Micro Focus site. (Registration required.) He's advising IT managers and directors to get busy. Gartner people like to incite. Make changes, he says, or you'll believe the same thing Albert Einstein said. "Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal," Vecchio quotes Einstein. It appears Einstein actually said something like this, but then Vecchio adds to the quote, "no good can come of it." 

(Web resources agree that Einstein said technological progress, not change. This distinction has always been the undoing of change cheerleaders like Vecchio. Progress is something the IT pros must accomplish. The analysts and vendors will only supply the change, unless you hire them for it. We'll leave it as an exercise for our readers to determine the context of the quote from Einstein, who's invoked for everything from IT to baby development videos.)

The good news, Vecchio says, is that the people in IT are retiring who believe change is no good. It's a bit naive for Vecchio to think that stubborn IT managers and CIOs are standing in the way of improvements, unless they own their companies. Change -- whether it's adopting Micro Focus COBOL instead of the ACUCOBOL solution, or embracing even wider like cloud computing or the .NET distinction -- needs to show proof of success, or it's just an experiment.

The need for proof is what keeps 50-ish IT professionals on the job when they'd rather be retired. What you know remains an asset to your company. Proven success keeps COBOL running much of the world's business computing, 50 years after the language was invented. It's hard to refuse something that's worked for this long -- if its community keeps reinventing it. If your IT efforts include care for languages and programs, like so many do, then caring about your next COBOL should be an issue to investigate.

HP's history becomes a phenomenon

The company which created the HP 3000 is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. Perhaps it's the coincidence of a zero-numbered commemoration, but history that relates to the 3000 seems to be in the air this week. Most of it represents snapshots of an era we'll never return to, and some community members are thankful for the departure. But what's been left behind could be much more valuable than histories and manuals.

Today Forbes has an early review of the first book by a retired HP executive, Chuck House, who knew and worked with the HP 3000 business. The HP Phenomenon earned praise from a reviewer who's written his own HP book, George Anders. But the reviewer of Phenomenon wrote a more upbeat take on HP's changes than House's clear-eyed memories. Anders wrote the Carly Fiorina saga Perfect Enough, a kinder view of the changes that CEO inflicted on the HP which House remembers.

House still reveres the HP of the Sixties through the 1980s, just like the 3000 community venerates the MPE Software Pocket Guides of the 1970s and '80s. A current thread on the 3000 newsgroup has floated into memory lane about that era of the 3000. Like the guide itself -- and the HP computer management which House admires in his book -- the world has changed enough to make its best days appear to be behind it.

There's no doubt that the pocket guides are a token of the past. I was lucky to receive one that had been in the trenches, obviously well used and well-loved. Alfredo Rego passed on his MPE III guide once the OS started to move out of MPE V territory. But like the community members who now recall how vital a tool the book once was, Alfredo wrote a note in his guide's cover in 1987.

This little MPE III pocket guide is as valid today as it was in 1978. As a matter of fact, I used this guide today to change THE bit that made Adager run on the HP3000 Series 930.

As that summer of 1987 wrapped up, the Series 930 was the test-pilot aircraft of the overdue PA-RISC fleet. Only a handful were ever shipped, and HP replaced every one for free with the more capable Series 950.

By the time my MPE III guide was in heavy use, the community had another wizard, this one a wunderkind revered by veterans and novices alike. Eugene Volokh co-created the MPEX utility along with his dad Vladimir. House was on the scene at HP in those times. House was also part of the HP 3000 history seminar from last summer. Steve Cooper, who founded Allegro Consultants with Stan Sieler in that era, chronicled the Eugene legend in this video from the meeting.

The story includes a note from Sieler about the novelty of the concept of a super-MPE with wildcarding capability. One engineer in the 3000 group, Walt McCullough, engineered a similar concept. But HP wasn't focused in 1980 on incremental technology that could become so vital as MPEX, Sieler explains

House was working on his book during the summer of that seminar; the book is only available today through Stanford University Press, and the Amazon UK Web site. But there are excerpts from the book available through House's blog. In one blog entry, he takes a break from his memoirs of the Bill & Dave HP era to note how much change has occurred in the boardroom of the modern HP.

In an entry titled Whither HP Now? House explains why he believes HP has made a habit of under-investing in creating technology.

HP, after spending 9% of revenues for 60 years, almost like clockwork, cut that to 6% under [CEO] Lew Platt's regime, and from the midpoint of Carly's time until now, it has been reduced by a cool 0.5% per year, until now it is only 3% of revenues, one-half of IBM's investments in its future. To cut R&D by two-thirds, to rework HP Labs to the point of only pursuing work that the divisions will market or that universities will support (huh, say that again?), is to sell out the future. Period.

One might confidently predict that the constant wellspring of "renewal" -- so long the hallmark of HP -- is running dry. The acquisitions had better work.

There is an HP which still lives at many HP 3000-using companies: the vendor who will supply replacement systems and environments as migration targets. Two paths can be followed: one toward technology in which HP continues to invest, HP-UX. The other path is away from software innovation and toward standards, following Windows or Linux advances. An HP which couldn't imagine why they'd need a Pocket Guide for any product will exist in the future. But looking to the past won't clear the crystal ball to reveal when that "day of the dry well" arrives for HP. A customer who invests in HP's future needs to see smaller, more nimble tech companies continue to join and create the Hewlett-Packard phenomenon.

For the customer who's always wondered what the inside of the HP Garage looks like, the workplace of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard is on display over the Web. A video tour, led by HP archivist Anna Mancini, is online -- so you can see the head of that wellspring. At what the industry calls the Birthplace of Silicon valley, the garage restored by HP shows the era of HP's phenomenon when R&D was all the company could offer.

E-forms integration worth discounted price

Minisoft announced this morning that its eFORMz document management software is being discounted by 35 percent through the end of January, 2010. The software creates PDF documents for e-mailing and secure exchange. It runs with multiple platforms, including the HP 3000. Customers using products such as Optio, CreatForm and Jetform qualify, as well as others.

In addition to smart forms, deeper barcode features and a secure numeric font for check printing, eFORMz brings something even more significant to a paperless drive toward PDF forms and e-document management: ongoing support and continued updates. Those are benefits that are worth paying a vendor for, rather than working with open source solutions.

Enterprise IT in the 3000 world can have pretty low budgets these days, but free solutions cost something. The price is the integration expertise, usually measured in hours or days spent plugging in an open source tool. You rely on the open source community to keep your free solution updated, too, unless you've studied the source code enough to create "diffs" for MPE/iX versions. That's what QSS developer Mark Bixby is doing this month. He has also advised the 3000 community to learn such porting skills.

Minisoft reports that it will include updates to the new eFORMz for one year as part of its discount. While you cannot be certain that open source software will need more work in its first year, there's no guarantee of such updates being created.

Bixby gave sage advice to the community in the years after HP announced its exit from the 3000. While still working at HP, but after he moved away from 3000 duties, he said anyone staying on the system in a homestead mode would be well served to learn how to port open source solutions like Samba or perl. A vendor with a paid solution lets a homestead site leave the driving to vendor developers, like Neal Kazmi at Minisoft.

Service alert: Use our alternate address Thursday

We're having routine maintenance on our 3000newswire.com Web server on Thursday. Between the hours 7AM EDT and 5 PM we expect a gap of about two hours of downtime, as our Web host 3k Associates has new electrical service installed.

Despite the downtime on the archive/original Web site, you can still read the NewsWire's blog Thursday at anytime. Please use the alternate address:

3000newswire.blogs.com

to keep up with our news and features. Like any HP 3000 site, planned downtime is a part of our lives. We're happy to have an alternative to go along with our high-uptime main Web service on 3000newswire.com. Next year we renew that Web address for our 15th year. Along the way we're been lucky to have the savvy and experience of Chris Bartram, our original Webmaster, at 3k.

Open source port project in play for print

QSS, the K-12 app software company with clients in both HP 3000 and Unix/Linux markets, has kicked off a porting project for MPE/iX software. Founding partner Duane Percox reports that his company is rewriting open source software to aid in printing documents for 3000 systems.

Mark Bixby of QSS is at work on the porting project. Bixby ported the Apache Web server as well as Internet connectivity software to the 3000's OS late in the last decade, then joined the HP 3000 lab technical staff in the Internet & Interoperability unit. He left HP to join QSS in 2008.

Percox said the project will bring Ghostpdl and Ghostscript to the 3000. The former software can be used as a file format converter, such as printer language-to-PDF converter, the latter can be combined with a printer driver in "virtual printer" PDF creators. The QSS work will focus on including the 3000's common printer language, PCL, in the conversion options.

Ghostscript has been ported to Windows, HP-UX, Linux, OpenVMS and Mac operating systems. The QSS project will be shared with the 3000 community as open source when the work is complete, Percox said.

Many HP 3000 applications use the PCL printer language to send output to print devices. PDF is not supported widely in the 3000 application world, but the standard is omnipresent in the computer industry at large. Ghostscript will give 3000 sites a means to create PDF documents from 3000 reports. The open source solution would have to be integrated with an MPE/iX app, but at least the port project will make it available.

Percox said the work might put pressure on some suppliers of output and print products for the 3000. It gives the sites with a tight budget another option for printing, however.

“This might negatively impact vendors with expensive PDF generation products for the HP 3000,” Percox said. “But Ghostscript is a great feature for the financially-challenged customer who wants full PCL-to-PDF capability.”

Unwrapping the Myths of Security

What the Computer Security Industry Doesn't Want You to Know

Review by Steve Hardwick, CISSP

I have worked in the information security business for more than 10 years, and I’ve learned there is one constant throughout – change. Keeping up with the ever-present cat and mouse battle between the hackers and security industry is a full time job. The Myths of Security by John Viega (O'Reilly Media, $29.95) provides a good view of what the security industry faces and why they sometimes fall short in the eyes of many people. So the next time you are hitting your computer with your keyboard in utter frustration, put it down, pick up this book and take a look at why computer security is so hard. You can also learn what doesn’t work to secure computers – and by extension, good security practices. Some of the biggest security weaknesses will surprise you.
 
This book begins by outlining how easy it is to have a security problem. Early chapters cover the methods of attacking computer systems and how they have evolved. These include simple viruses focused on specific operating systems up to more sophisticated Web-based attacks and social engineering exploits. New attacks are independent on the operating system; rather, they exploit the lack of knowledge of the user. (Despite their sanguine outlook, even Apple users are wide open to these types of attacks.) Chapter 15 has an excellent example of a phishing attack that demonstrates how the bad guy can get key information without ever touching the operating system. According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, June of 2009 was the second-highest month for number of new phishing sites detected.

The author makes two very crucial points: First, it is no longer just a battle of viruses anymore – any computer user is vulnerable. Second, users will want an antivirus application that can deal with all manner of information security threats — viruses, malware, adware, phishing, cross site scripting and more.

This book provides an excellent view of many basic security elements, then steps into an overview of the good, the bad and the ugly of the tools that are out there. The author is critical of products that look great on the vendor’s Web site, but would bring a network to its knees if used, for example, intrusion prevention systems.

Viega dedicates several chapters to explain in plain language why some of these tools are not suited for personal use or for small companies. Many solid recommendations throughout inform individual users how to better protect themselves from a wide range of security threats. There is deeper detail on some of the more important security tools, but you'll need a good technical understanding for these sections. Chapter 29 “Application Security on a Budget” highlights the type of issues that are important – emphasizing training and simple free solutions vs. multiple expensive high tech solutions such as those intrusion prevention systems and virtualization.
 
As a former solutions developer, Viega is in an ideal position to give an informative peek over the fence at the challenges the security vendors face. In Chapters 8, 9 and 10, he breaks down the difficulty of vetting the thousands of pieces of data that daily go into our computers. He also explains why product vendors have some difficult choices in meeting end-users’ security as well satisfying the needs of vendor shareholders. This results in some odd methodologies that do not always have the end user’s interest as the highest priority – Chapter 7, “Google is Evil.” Or at worst, as outlined in Chapter 18, even plain old snake oil in a digital wrapper.

Many users do not realize the high cost of development and sheer manpower it takes to combat the threats that are out there. There are many detailed examples throughout the book showing how the business world shapes security products as much as the hackers.
 
The author does lend his industry experience to give suggestions on how the industry can better attack the problems. However, they may be somewhat controversial – Chapter 39, “What Antivirus Companies should be doing” is a good example. The chapter proposes that the antivirus vendors act as a “safe application” clearinghouse and restrict programs that have not been classified. But this goes against the open culture of the user community, even though Apple is trying this approach with its iPhone applications, with mixed reviews.
 
On the flip side, some attention is paid to understanding why there are hackers. Hacking has moved from the era of bravado and bragging rights into organized crime, as well as offering people in disadvantaged countries a way to make easy money. (In one recent example, a Russian consortium offered a malware affiliate bounty: infect a Mac, earn 43 cents.) However, the issue of outdated legal infrastructure in many developing countries which enables this, was not highlighted in the book. Those policies are a major hole in the global response to computer crime.

Similarly, it would have been a good balance to include a discussion on what the various governments are trying to do with new laws and regulations to help combat the problem. Conversely, the book did cover some newer threats such as data hostaging – which is becoming more of a threat to industries at large. For example, consider the salesman who will not return his laptop with all the customer information on it until his last commission check is in the bank.
 
If you are looking for a quick-fix to stop your computer from grinding to a halt every couple of days after your kids have unwittingly loaded the latest and greatest malware, then this is not the book for you. If you want a more in-depth understanding of today's threats, what you can do -- and what, if anything, anyone is trying to do to fix them -- then I would recommend this book.

Steve Hardwick has over 10 years of information security experience. He has worked with different environments from military customers, financial institutions, healthcare organizations and Fortune 1000 companies, as well as conducting security assessments for large and small corporations. He is currently Partner Manager at Mobile Armor Inc. providing cost effective solutions for securing and protecting mobile data.

Leaving COBOL? isCOBOL offers Java path

Migrations away from the HP 3000 mean leaving a fine-tuned COBOL behind. HP shaped COBOL II to include intrinsics which plug directly into the IMAGE database and the 3000's OS. Customers who move to another platform need to rewrite those intrinsic calls for a new COBOL. AcuCOBOL needs far less revision that other COBOLs, because it was designed in 2001-02 to incorporate most of those same 3000 specialties.

But if you're going to be doing any rewriting at all, why not aim for more than a new COBOL that acts like the old one? If a transfer to Java from COBOL is your desire, a software company called Veryant has a language that claims to speak both languages.

Java got a jolt of news this week while its bridegroom, Oracle, gathered the Oracle faithful at its annual Oracle World. James Gosling, considered the father of Java, reported that Java's NetBeans development environment and Glassfish, an open source application server, are more popular than ever. Gosling said this week that Glassfish, as free as any Linux distro, has been downloaded at the rate of a million copies a month.

Except that Oracle already has its own development environment. Plus an application server that it loves. There may be some overlap in that acquisition. But a million copies a month carries a lot of clout. It's things like Glassfish that make Java look attractive during a move away from COBOL. That's where Veryant's isCOBOL could take a role in the move away from COBOL. It all depends on what caliber of Java you get out of it.

Remember, we're talking about migrations that will require revisions of COBOL here. These sites are already committed to rewrites, somewhat automated but which require testing. When you've got the hood up, can you get all the way to Java? isCOBOL compiles COBOL code into Java. In the late 1990s, a time of great optimism for Java, the 3000 community not only had an interest in the language, but third party did its best to make the technology transfer a reality. Chuck Townsend of Synkronix pushed the Java stone up the 3000 hill, but not even his IBM experience could give PERCobol a place to rest in 3000 shops. And that product understood COBOL II's extensions, according to Townsend.

Alfredo Iglesias of Veryant would love to work with a 3000 site on that kind of adoption. Veryant's isCOBOL came to our attention when Speedware's Nick Fortin pointed it out after our article about the two migration COBOL choices. With isCOBOL there may be three, and Transoft has certified its Transoft U/SQL Adapters for use with the isCOBOL Application Platform Suite.

You'd be among the very first to choose this isCOBOL for a 3000 project. "We do not have any customers yet that have used isCOBOL to replace HP COBOL II," Iglesias said. "We would be glad to work with any interested in the future." Migration can offer such groundbreaking opportunity. Java may be worth the experimentation, considering those millions of adopters out there.

Iglesias admits that the COBOL II specialties will demand some replacement. "I must bring to your attention that isCOBOL does not offer any compatibility to the HP 3000 extensions to the COBOL standard found in HP COBOL II. That means that they will have to be removed by the customer or a migration company in order for the code to compile and execute with isCOBOL."

isCOBOL was also on the radar screen of our author of the "Deciding Between COBOLs for Migration" article. Mike Howard mentioned it in passing at first, calling it no major player. It seems the adoption rate to date in the 3000 world confirms his view. Howard has his own assessment of isCOBOL's utility as well.

It is a COBOL that has no COBOL compiler. And yet the development process is to

1. Write the COBOL source code
2. Compile it to produce an object
3. Run the compiled object

And this is what the developer sees when he programs in isCOBOL. But in fact, the compile step actually has two steps in it. 1. Convert the COBOL source to Java source; 2. Compile the Java source.

So the actual process is

1. Code the program in COBOL
2. Convert the COBOL source to Java source
3. Compile the Java source
4. Run the Java object code

This process clearly demonstrates one additional item: how accurately COBOL can be converted to Java. For this process to work, the converter must be 100 percent at all times.

You can actually stop the "compiler" after the COBOL to Java conversion step and get the converted Java code. Unfortunately, it isn't much use, because the conversion was simply done for the Java compilation to take place — and the actual Java code is horrible. A better application code converter would be written to convert the COBOL to Java to produce code so that is good, maintainable Java.

A word on how to catch our words quickly

 Permit us to pause a moment to show readers how to get immediate notice of our reports. We'd also like to highlight a new reason to return to our front page during the day to see mini-updates.

Twitter makes both of these features possible. The moment a blog article is posted, Twitter notifies you if you're following @3000newswire on the service. Even if you don't participate in Twitter, the note appears in our Twitter section of this page -- right-hand column, just under the Transoft ad.

That's also the spot where our mini-updates appear, as well as in your Twitter feed if you follow us. (Do you see a pattern here? We like Twitter because tweet have to be short: 140 characters or less. For an old print headline writer like me, it's a fun challenge.) We're working on one or two Twitter extras during the workdays, sometimes with a link. We'll do Outtakes, since most stories have more material than we can use. We don't want to wear out our welcome. Readers have things to do in addition to keeping up with what's new or helpful.

You can also get our reports sent to you via other services. Twitter is hot now. But there's other technology to keep our news on your plate.

Some of our audience uses newsreader software to take our daily feeds. This is powered by the RSS standard. Bruce Hobbs, a veteran 3000 developer, swears by Google Reader. There are others, some tied to mail services like Yahoo, others standalone programs. Newsreaders give you a timeline of articles, just like our blog does. You control what you see, although the helpful Twitter links won't be on a newsreader feed.

How to newsread? Right-hand column again, just above the Community Comments. "Subscribe to this blog's feed." One click and you're on the way to having the 3000 NewsWire appear in your reader.

Several years ago, we invited readers to send a request to have us e-mail a "Blog Me" update when articles appeared. Twitter gives us a foolproof way to avoid the spam boxes with your requests. Weekly or so, we will remind you of the articles, via e-mail. But the best way to stay up to the minute, and keep up with updated tweets, is through Twitter or on this page.

We return you now to our regular coverage, in this main column, on individual category or article pages -- or over on the Twitter feed at right. Follow us.

Managing Applications Instead of Migrations

Commerce in the 3000 community has been dominated by migration tools and services. While many utility and some app vendors are selling support contracts, new business has been hard to acquire. It's been close to eight years since HP announced its exit from the community. And after two postponements, the closing of HP's support doors is less than 15 months away.

But that timeline hasn't dislodged applications from many 3000 customer workflows. So some of the same companies who offer migration engagements will also manage your 3000 apps. Speedware is discounting those services for customers who sign on until the end of 2009. Its marketing manager Chris Koppe said that HP's "end of life" label for 2010 doesn't match up to everything he sees.

2010 = End of Life is valid at some larger sites, but smaller ones will rely on 3000 apps for awhile. End of life "has a different meaning for different people," he said. "While the smaller shops have applications on the side, like mail servers, their core businesses are running on the HP 3000."

And so, Speedware (like a few other providers) sees 3000 app management as an important service to the customer. For a limited time it's waiving fees for "application support set-up and knowledge transfer" services to attract this homesteading business, designed to match the lifespan that a customer sees for its 3000s.

Koppe said that Speedware has started to push application support for 3000s, extra effort to win customers with a service Speedware has offered for more than a year. Customers who asked the vendor got app support up to this summer, but Speedware wants to connect with more of these sites.

He believes his company has the largest number of 3000 software programmers employed or on contract "that know 3000s inside and out and can handle any kind of environment."  Koppe mentioned MB Foster as another source; the Support Group inc specializes in ERP application support, especially MANMAN.

Koppe reasons that because his company's programmers have been busy with migration details, moving applications had made them experts in the 3000's languages. "For those customers that are not going to be migrating right away, a lot of them may need to deal with issues like lack of programming staff -- human resource backup options."

These kinds of potential customers for app support have no 3000 programmers anymore, or can't answer questions about how much 3000 code they have. "How are they maintaining this code," he wonders. "It just runs in the background." MB Foster's Birket Foster agreed about the focus on apps for the community. "It's all about the applications," he said at the recent e3000 Community Meet. Both men invoked the "what about winning the lottery" question, where a 3000 customer's only expert hits the jackpot and curtails an IT career, suddenly.

Speedware will let you pay their experts to maintain application code, batch processing, enhancements, help desk, vendor management, online processing. "It's not hardware support, and it's not operating system support," he explained. Speedware can refer this administration support for hardware and OS to another supplier, and then offer a full package for a company that wants to keep its 3000 apps without any 3000 staff.

Co-location, or offsite system hosting, gets referred by Speedware to the Support Group if a customer needs that level of support. The talent and resources are out there in the community, Koppe said. The app support offers the same benefits as you'd seek from any homestead support provider -- safeguarding IT systems and possibly reducing costs.

HMS host makes do with 3000 hosts for now

Last week we reported on a pair of 3000s running the duty free shop at two US airports. They're not alone. Brian Edminster, who manages the duty-free application and the 3000s, called to report on two more airports running the server as well as a HQ system. HMS Host, the customer, once consolidated retail services for 20 airports' duty free shops on the HQ's 3000.

HMS Host was listed as a 3000 customer on the OpenMPE online roster, compiled several years ago. The company is exiting the 3000 user community as quickly as it can, but customized applications like the duty-free app keep HMS in the fold for now, probably into 2010.

"There's still value in the business logic," said Edminster, who's studied the application with its creator since the middle '90s. He thinks the retail app is so sound that it could be used in a small chain of department stores.

Whatever the future value of the duty-free app at the HMS-run airport shops, the program is getting the job done there. HP continues to service this customer with support, but Edminster is the key link to keeping the shops online. This relationship defines one share of the 3000 community: stable apps maintained by third parties with no products or support to track for anybody who's counting the 3000 populace.

Do these stable-to-static apps, whose days are numbered, count as 3000 customers? Perhaps, if your business is selling application support for static systems. Certainly, if you're ready to provide front-line support for the OS and apps, like Edminster's Applied Technologies does. Not so much, if you want to sell a migration tool or a professional engagement.

A customer in this category -- which I would call an interim homesteader -- often has a project in play to make its exit, even if the timeline is fuzzy. At HMS the company has moved much of its operations onto SAP, Edminster reports. In-house resources do this migration work. What's more, at HMS the company has a fall-back plan if the 3000 apps cannot be folded in the massive SAP solution suite.

These four HP 3000s -- three 9x8s and one A-Class server -- could be taken offline and out of HMS if 1. The company gets out of the duty-free shop business altogether, or 2. HMS hands off its duty-free to the Portugal-based sister company that manages other duty-free with a PC-based server configuration.

Remote apps that serve US airports starts to creep into cloud computing, with a resource attached via networks and tapped by users via PCs in the shops. The sticking point is the networking into and out of major US airports, those built before the 1990s. "It's flaky at best," Edminster says of the airport network service. 

HP 3000 work still surfaces, on contract

Even in a marketplace for a computer the vendor stopped building six years ago, jobs emerge to manage HP 3000s. I put out a Google Watch on the HP 3000 (and HP3000) years ago, and the daily results have delivered some surprising gems. Today's catch includes an opening in the Orlando area for six months of administering HP 3000 systems.

Don't all of you go applying at once now. Even though we're told the pool of 3000 IT pros is shrinking, we hear of many 3000 veterans who are at liberty, too.

What's in Orlando? The job listing is pretty detailed. It reports that ARGI, a subscription management and fulfillment application/outsourced service, leads the list:

This position will administer all aspects of HP 3000 minicomputers including the hardware and operating system. Applications include: ARGI subscription fulfillment, Maestro, 3000 Security, and Omnidex. Must be experienced in COBOL programming. Additional skills in Microsoft server, IIS and PC setup / support. Duties include developing and maintaining COBOL programs, develop and maintain visual basic programs, installing software patches & upgrades, maintaining nightly backups, and supporting PCs.

That's right, you read correctly: This job includes development in COBOL on a 3000, in the year 2009.

We'll have more to share about this kind of 3000 next week, but the label for this installation is often "Longtime Success Needs New Steward." Without getting too speculative, Time-Warner once operated its subscription and premium fulfillment services for its publications in the Central Florida area. That's precisely the level of company that's got intentions to leave the platform, but cannot find a replacement solution that fits as well as its 20-year-tested business logic in COBOL.

These kinds of sites and customers represent opportunity for the marketplace in general. If you cannot find a qualified person who can take a 6-month contract to administer, you might move the app to an outsourced hosting provider. If the app looks creaky but runs fast, you could modernize without leaving MPE/iX. As we heard today from a consultant and app support expert, "there many miles to go before all these 3000s go to sleep." In the meantime, some need a watchful eye.

In Orlando they need "excellent COBOL programming skills and above average Visual Basic programming skills." If you've acquired both those skills and have a yen to live near Disney World, get in touch.

3000s continue to fly free: but how many?

At last month's e3000 Community Meet, Speedware's Chris Koppe shared an estimate. The company surveyed its customer base, then called or contacted other sites from lists of known 3000 locations. At most, Koppe said, Speedware believes there are 1,000 HP 3000 customers still running systems.

The size of the known 3000 universe is as tough to track as any other kind of expanding entity. By expanding, I mean accelerating away from HP. Everyone who's remaining on the system is moving away from the vendor in relationship to their 3000 use. These customers have been in free flight, out of formation and out of contact for many years now. HP never knew for sure how many 3000s were running, by its own admission. The vendor's estimates drifter further afield with every year that it relied on resellers, then didn't close the loop on support contract renewals. About the only thing HP can report on these days is the relative silence compared to years ago.

So when we heard today from Dave Wiseman, who helped bring ScreenJet into the 3000 world late in the 1990s, about a few 3000s he encountered in-flight, we wondered: Are a pair of US airports, both using 3000 systems in duty-free shops, on anyone's radar who's tracking the size of the universe?

Wiseman, who's working these days for computer fraud prevention company iovation.com, checked in after he checked out of the duty-free shops in the airports.

I was in Minneapolis Airport on Sunday and went to the duty free. When I checked out they were using an HP 3000 green screen system! Apparently it’s still in use in Minneapolis and [Seattle's] Sea-Tac.

In this era of transition, the size of the known universe becomes important for both owners and vendors in the community. The former, they want to know how many people are left manning the oars. Too few (by whatever measure) could mean a loss of knowledge and hardware resources that could jeopardize the system's reliability.

For the vendors, the numbers are more crucial. They help determine how much resource to supply to the market. If the amount of water in the pond can't float the development and support boats, a vendor has to launch a smaller vessel, or put their 3000 business into dry dock. So people ask about this number, just as they have ever since the NewsWire first went into print 14 years ago.

The 1,000 Customers number is the lowest we've heard shared with the 3000 community, but every universe needs to have boundaries both low and high. We'd love to hear from a vendor or supplier who knew about the 3000s in those airports' Duty Free shops. The fact that these systems are tallying sales sparks two thoughts. First, how many more might be out of the main flight path? Second, we wonder who might compile a continuing list of customers -- other than ours. Let us hear from you about any free flying systems you encounter.

OpenMPE searches for source money

The OpenMPE advocacy group is looking for investors. This all-volunteer, not-for-profit organization has passed HP's examination for a source code license. Now it needs money to pay for this license, along with some administration funding to make the knowledge available to its members and its virtual lab.

Above, the group's director Matt Perdue explains the situation in a video of two minutes, recorded at last month's e3000 Community Meet. He's assisted at one point by OpenMPE chair Birket Foster (pan to the right), who explains some circumstances under which HP could terminate these licenses.

A terminated MPE/iX license hasn't ever happened to customers, because they weren't using source code. But the read-only MPE/iX source is for development of patches to the 3000. This is new territory here. No third party has ever asked a constituency in public for funding to open a lab. This is the new turf of volunteer, advocate-based development. OpenMPE at least wants to assemble an independent organization more extensive than a Web-based code forge, the vehicle most open source communities use.

But because HP's license prevents anyone from discussing the terms in public, the source license doesn't have the ironclad, tangible rules and policies you'd expect for an investment in a product.

Neither Perdue or Foster was permitted to state all the reasons that HP could terminate the source license. (It's part of the license terms that none of this gets broadcasted.) Why would a license termination matter? It appears to be part of a guarantee of future support -- something not many software companies will ever offer. The group intends to establish a development lab for patches, then support its work, for a membership fee. If HP revokes the source code license, then using that source for patch support violates the contract terms. We think. Nobody could say for sure.

HP did put an extra requirement into the OpenMPE source license, Foster said. "Certain board members are key to allowing this [licensing] to flow," he said. "They want us to do our own succession planning, so [HP] is good with whoever's there." He added that HP didn't restrict OpenMPE as a licensee in the event the group's board all retired from service. "The next group would be able to take [the license] over." We didn't hear details about HP's permissions to review OpenMPE board changes. Since the licenses are a confidential matter, there's no way to compare terms of any other licensees. So far, no one else has announced they hold an MPE/iX source license.

Perdue said that "there would have to be a specific reason for HP to change its mind" about revoking OpenMPE's license. One reason Perdue did say out loud: A departure of "key people" from the volunteer board.

There's already $1,000 in the license fund as a result of the community meeting. Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies, which is preparing an open source MPE/iX Web site, chipped in the startup money right after the Community Meet of Sept. 23. If your company (or you as an individual) want to invest in the OpenMPE license, the group offers the following deposit point to send your checks (made out to OpenMPE):

OpenMPE, Inc.
c/o Matt Perdue, Treasurer
PO Box 460091
San Antonio, TX 78246-0091

3000s still under Boeing's wings

Large customers have been among the earliest and most active migration sites, but some companies with high-flying profiles, like Boeing, will use the 3000 beyond 2010.

The aircraft manufacturer is making efforts to leave the platform as soon as possible, but the timing of its migration isn't tied to any HP support schedule. Long-time NewsWire reader Ray Legault from Boeing checked in last week and reports that some key applications may take awhile to move. Third party support and outsourced services are in place to let Boeing's application owners work at their own migration schedule.

"There are just some Finance, QA and Manufacturing apps that are left," said the Boeing systems integrator. "They want the platform to disappear ASAP. It may take a while to migrate."

If finance, quality assurance and manufacturing sound like mission-critical apps, that might be mitigated by the app's reach into the Boeing operations. The company generated $60 billion in sales last year. It's long-anticipated Dreamliner 787 is scheduled to arrive in the market just as HP ends its 3000 support.

In Boeing IT, the group which owns the application establishes its migration plan. The plans which are in place vary in approach and schedule.

"They let each business system owner and a architecture board decide where each app will migrate to," Legault said. "An off-the-shelf [replacement] is the main thought, even if it has reduced functionality. One app does not have any off-the-shelf options, so they are re-writing it into Oracle/Unix, slowly."

Legault says Boeing plans to use Halifax and Beechglen for 3000 support when HP drops its 3000 support services at the end of 2010.

Just A Minute: Eloquence Update at the Meet

Eloquence database creator Michael Marxmeier gives a presentation at the recent e3000 Community Meet in this video, shot handheld from the front row of the SF Airport Hyatt hotel meeting room. Presenters had to limit talks to 15 minutes or less; most were even briefer. We grabbed a minute of his talk for the camera.

Marxmeier's slides are not yet part of the Meet's archive page we reported on earlier today. In this video he has a slide up which describes the following overall technology enhancements for the latest release of Eloquence 8:

• Implements new thread model for Eloquence database server (improving on the default HP-UX threading)
• Provides base for future enhancements
• Aligns Eloquence technology to newer hardware and OS capabilities including multiple CPU cores, CPU core speed increases made more moderate, and larger memory sizes.

Functional enhancements for the latest release include

• Scalability
• Database replication
• Point-in-time recovery / incremental recovery
• Monitoring improvements
• Programmatic access to achived database transactions
• query3k and utility program improvements

Community Meet slides go online

Speedware's Chris Koppe, president-elect of the HP Connect user group, announced this morning that the presentations from last week's e3000 Community Meet are available online.

The six sets of PowerPoint slides can be downloaded from www.hpmigrations.com/sfevent

The slide sets include Koppe's own, which detail the efforts the user group is making for the 3000 community, as well as a Speedware update on migration and homesteading issues. Speedware offers a service to manage 3000 applications for customers who are homesteading, as well as its migration tools and services.

Other slide sets online today are from Transoft, presenting migration and application upgrade information; an update from ScreenJet's Alan Yeo about its modernization tools; David Floyd of the Support Group, explaining sustainability options and services; and OpenMPE secretary Donna Hofmeister, presenting details on the group's campaign to fund an MPE/iX source license (as well as services coming online soon.)

We have video and audio from these talks we're working to edit and post here in the days to come.

Reading Potential in the 3000 Sector

NewsWire Q&A

Craig Lalley opens up prospects for HP 3000s to do more. The founder and owner of the EchoTech consulting and IT service, Lalley is a frequent contributor to the 3000 community through helpful postings to the 3000 newsgroup. He's made a detailed study of storage expansion for the system, a specialty that serves up the last technology to enhance the 3000 into configurations, some of which were first purchased long ago.

    Lalley has been active in the HP 3000 community for over 25 years, and he's worked on every model of the HP 3000 from the Series III to the largest N-Class servers. For more than a decade he was the senior technical support manager at Stone Container in Chicago, managing 60 HP 3000s around the country. When not busy reading memory dumps, he is busy chauffeuring his five children, who are not socially-deprived homeschoolers.

    Lalley also consults on performance enhancement for business systems that go beyond 3000 installations. He's managed migrations as an outsourced resource and even maintains a replacement system for a company that hired him to help move off its HP 3000.

    In his work as a veteran who both expands and replaces 3000s, Lalley sees the full scope of the transition choices your community faces today. We asked him to talk about the technology to extend homesteading as well as the realities of moving away from the 3000. We traded email for our interview in August, just after his return from a cross-country family vacation, during the week of the Twitter and Facebook outages.

What technology offers the biggest opportunity to improve the performance and value of an HP 3000 today?

    For those considering homesteading on an HP 3000, the single best way to increase performance and reliability is to add a high-speed RAID array. The VA7410 will allow 2*2Gb per second fibre connections. The VA is rated at 45,000 IOs per second, which is well above the limits of an N-Class 750 4-way system.

    Another option, given that a discontinued HP 3000 is relatively inexpensive, is to buy a second HP 3000 for reporting reasons. A second HP 3000 would make it possible to offload the reporting aspects of the system, thus reducing the load on the primary computer. Of course, the costs of licensing the software may make this option unavailable. A second 3000 could also be used for parts.

Are the 3000s built with PCI peripheral architecture capable of using more modern disk and backup storage? How do they compare?

    Yes, the A-Class and N-Class products using the PCI bus are capable of 2Gb per second fiber connections. Compared the 2Gb/sec to the sustained throughput of 20Mb/sec on the NIO bus (9x9, 9x8 and 9x7 systems), the performance improvement is drastic.

How does the mix of 3000 and non-3000 consulting work shake out for you this year? Are there clients who engage you for both?

    Clearly the HP 3000 user base is disintegrating. At the same time, there are quite a few companies that have not even started a migration.

    I believe the main reason for the lack of those migrations is that there is no business requirement to migrate off the HP 3000. The second reason would be the economy. Most companies don't feel comfortable with the capital requirements for a migration at this time.

What is keeping the remaining companies from migrating off the system? Is it a roadblock that can be lifted with know-how?

    I think which the faith in the economy is at an all time low, the costs for a migration are quite high. The tools to migrate off the HP 3000 are quite good, and there are several options available. I believe cost is probably the deciding factor.

Do you see a useful future for the 3000s out there more than three years from now?

    I am old enough to remember the pending “Death of Mainframes.” I believe the death of the HP 3000 has been greatly exaggerated.

    The HP 3000 is a powerful machine for its time, and its maintenance cost is an order of magnitude less the other products. A well-configured Linux box could probably give the HP 3000 a good run for the money.

What's the oldest HP 3000 you know of that's still in production use? What's the risk that a customer runs by identifying themselves as users of older hardware?

    I know of a couple 918s and a 937 that are in production. I think the biggest risk is the availability of parts. FW-SCSI hard drives are going to be hard to find.

What are the top skills you've learned outside of 3000 techniques that pay off best for you? What have you added that's enhanced the value of your career investments?

    I can think of two skills that have really helped me. First, my understanding of requirements for storage, which are growing at exponential rates. My experience with HP VAs (Virtual Arrays), along with HP's XP enterprise storage solution, can be reused in all data processing shops, regardless of OS.

    I think the second skill set is to be able to communicate with the customers in their language  Most customers don't really care about memory, MHz and IO throughput. Customers care about orders processed, credit card throughput and management barometers.

Partners assemble at Community Meet

In another era we might have called them vendors, but the attendees at this month's e3000 Community Meet came together as partners. The 40 people who assembled at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt have been working together, or have that potential in the years to come when the terms users and vendors don't fit like they once did. Only three of the group could be called "users" in the old term. But those terms are "being deprecated," as old software like Java/iX has done. When HP steps out of the 3000 room in about 15 months, the phrase third-party won't even be accurate to describe the companies and experts who talked and listened all day on Sept. 23.

In a unique beginning, the master of ceremonies Alan Yeo invited everyone present at the start of the day to introduce themselves. We got almost everybody on our hand-held video camera to record the players who were taking the stage. We're introducing this video resource via a fresh 3000 NewsWire channel on YouTube, the world's steaming pile of entertainment, advertising, comedy, and frothing dissent. Of those four, only good humor was on tap in the e3000 meeting room. (There was dissent, but of the kind that doesn't end discussions or ruin chances to partner.)

Brian Duncombe started off the introductions, traveling out of his retirement to attend after he created performance and clustering software in the 1980s and '90s. Consultant Bruce Hobbs in his trademark beard was also on the front row, along with consultant Jim Snider. Then we caught up again with Michael Watson's introduction. Watson reported he's still developing in COBOL, as were several others on that front row.

HP was present in the back of the room, as support engineer Cathlene McRae attests at the end of the intros. After lunch, HP's Alvina Nishimoto sat in the back and offered some insights during a roundtable session of more than an hour. James Hofmeister, working in support of Linux customers for HP, was also on hand.

Some people in the community hope this Meet might gather as many users than vendors. At this stage of the 3000's legend, those are the same attendees. Putting people together in a room all day sparks plans and renews trust. As the evening winked out, a sketch was emerging for 2010 Meet that focuses on training.

Social nets can narrow-cast to wide group

A healthy slug of video, audio and photos rode back in my laptop from this week's e3000 Community Meet. I also took away the warmth of connecting with friends I had not seen in years, people who made important contributions to the life and growth of the 3000. But one part of that rich day, unrecorded, was my own attempt at humor and inspiration, urging everyone to connect through social networks.

This talk began its life as writing on a screen, however, something you'd expect from a fellow who writes his way through life. I share it here and hope that it makes you smile and consider staying in touch until the next Meet via a social net of your choice. We track many major nets here at the NewsWire, using tools like the free TweetDeck console shown above. I hope to hear from you on the nets, or up here in our blog's comments.

Social Network Harm and Help: Advice & Wisecracks

Do you tweet? (All feathered creatures need not try to answer in English). Or share your life on Facebook? Or Digg your Web discoveries, or pile them up in a Delicious box? Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?

If not, you're in a big group. Maybe not the 70 million people rumored to be using one of these social networks. There's so many more, like the unique one that user group Connect operates, or the public Linked In site. Or Plaxo. Or something new, Cummerbund. (Sorry, just making that last one up.)

That fact about Cummerbund shows a little of the harm in this powerful new tool. You can make something up, and if it's not easily checked in a Google probe, it can get traction. The shorter the report, the easier it becomes to disguise or mistake. Take this tweet from Twitter, posted by @AngelaAtHP:

I witnessed a woman squeal and clap when she test-drove this new HP web-enabled printer at D23

This “tweet” on Twitter then included a link to a Web site. If you noticed Angela's Twitter name, you wouldn't be surprised where her link took you:

So Angela got eyeballs for her message that led to the HP printer Web page. Nearly 2,000 people follow her tweets, and so many of us tweet to others about her stuff. Warning: If follow her, she averages 5-10 tweets a day. Connect has a good tweeter who re-tweets, and so the HP user group helps spread the message of marketing from Angela LoSasso, employed by HP's printer marketing team to spread the marketing gospel about great printer solutions.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, as they said on Seinfeld. But when a message that short gets re-tweeted, it's lost all of its context unless you dig for it. You gotta admit, a woman squealing over a computer is pretty compelling. You either want to know something more about the computer product, or about the woman. Angela would rather you poke into what's cool about that Web-enabled printer.

Get used to it: There are many people in the generation behind us in this room who are paid to spread this stuff. You might even enjoy it, so long as there's nothing at stake. Information seems to have less and less at stake as we hurtle out of the Ought years and into the next decade.

Angela -- I know I'm picking on her, but all in sport, I love tweeters -- tells us “I'm in the storytelling business. How can I help you tell yours?” I felt so with-it when I heard this. (Does anybody even say "with it" anymore?) I've been in the storytelling business for a few years myself. But longevity doesn't matter so much in storytelling, not even in journalism. Nobody cared much that I was 27 when I edited my first HP newspaper. (Good thing, considering how little I knew.)

And we didn't have social networking to check up on the likes of me, thank goodness. Just like they used to say, “On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog,” I could say back in 1984, “On the telephone, I hoped nobody knew I was a callow “yut,” as those fellas called themselves in the film My Cousin Vinnie.

So I learned enough about the 3000 to stop being called an imbecile, “and no one was the wiser,” I thought. That wouldn't happen today, because we have social networking to check up on each other. And even though I started HP reporting in 1984, that Big Brother-esque checking up is a Good Thing. If you know how to use it to filter and add context.

Information is all about sources, to begin with. “Consider the source,” your mom might have told you when you said something about wearing this, or jumping off that. There's no better time than now to consider your source. The Internet disguised all the dogs. Social networks go further. They've hidden the sources behind personality. "How could that be a dog? He has such a rich baritone on the phone, and funny wisecracks." (Here I'm hoping that's what people said about me.) I fetch on command, though. I even point.

Back to the point. Social networks can help you fetch lots of information you didn't know you needed. Or even understand. They broaden your world. Just like a bigger map of where you need to go. But big maps, with lots of detail, need lots more charting skills.

You can do this. You crawled through the muck of ENQ/ACK sequences and pin-connection maps and even what the heck were the differences between Q-MIT and T-MIT. (Here's a hint; only one of them was a MPE release tape that an HP manager offered to eat.)

Detail is you, or we wouldn't have a world of computers tight and high flying enough to spread stories of women squealing at Web printers. (I know, you might be thinking, “and we really need this?”) You can do the detail of social networking, so long as you don't let it suck up all your real life.

There's the sin of over-sharing to avoid if you start to post to the social networks, too. People will tell you their lunch was a double swirl cone. (She didn't say where she got hers, dangit!) They will also report on more weighty topics. What you're looking for is facts, supported by real experience. It's not just enough to hear somebody say, “We gotta have this kind of health care or that.” Better to hear, “My mom is in the hospital and she can't get released soon enough, because her health plan doesn't pay for enough physical therapy.” You can say all that in less than 140 characters, so you could tweet it. I might ask, “What plan is that?” Or even offer some facts to help.

I bring up all of this nonsense because you are a group of IT pros who are renowned for community. A social network is a glue to keep you informed. I wish we'd all get a Twitter account and start following each other. Hey, you don't even have to tweet. Just being in the forest to hear the bird calls can help.

But only if you look for context, like who's sharing in the society. What their mission is in real life. (Google helps a lot in this kind of spelunking, but it's even better to ask around. Web pages can deceive. Remember those disguised dogs, now.)

I have become a real hound about social networks over the past year or so. I have accounts on all of these playgrounds. Some are more useful than others. You can look up my Delicious page of bookmarks, tweet or follow me personally or at 3000newswire, Friend me on Facebook, look me up on the new Connect myCommunity network for e3000 users. I started a Linked In group for the HP 3000 Community. There are also groups up there for the HP Way, 3000 Appreciation Society. I love it all. I find Twitter to be the biggest and woolliest universe, with Facebook a close second but richer in content. The more hurdles you need to clear to get into one of these, the better the caliber of the source.

Information is my job, though. I can float and find it rewarding to soar. If you find yourself flying too high to the sun, oh Icarus, and you feel your wings melting off your wax -- or maybe like Luke Skywalker, diving his X-Wing fighter too close to the Death Star -- pulla away, pull up, take back your time. Some say limit your social networking time, like you'd cut back on Splenda or See's Chocolates. Enjoy it, but make sure you have enough real life to share something new with the network. Contribute real content. Content will help you be heard, and that leads to giving you good stuff to listen to. The only way we learn anything is when we're listening

So the next time you hear the sound of squealing in a computer room, you'll know to look up from that browser, and listen for that drive in that RAID array going out. And ensure the storage device gets excluded and swapped automatically. And when the magic subsides, you can share a tweet if it all worked, or if not-so-much, then get some help. Because society is supposed to grow to help more of us, even though in each message we say less. Thanks for letting me say so much. In Twitter messages, this would have taken me more than 150 postings. And you still wouldn't have gotten in your message. I hope to hear from you out there soon, and often.

OpenMPE announces Jazz, Invent3k portals

The OpenMPE user advocacy group yesterday announced the availability of its hosts for documents and programs licensed from the HP Jazz Web server. The Invent3k free public development 3000, closed down by HP last November, is now also available according to OpenMPE, with both Jazz and Invent3k hosted on 3000s operated by board member Matt Perdue.

Perdue said at yesterday's e3000 Community Meet that the two services are available with a free account and now reside behind a firewall. OpenMPE will be the first organization to host the public access development services of Invent3k, a 3000 HP once operated for developers to test and create MPE/iX software. OpenMPE director Donna Hofmeister said that invent3k.openmpe.org will include the GNU development environment used to port open source software to MPE/iX.

Developers can request their free log-on account for Invent3k by e-mailing Hofmeister at donna@allegro.com

The resources the community is migrating from HP's Jazz Web server are still in a growth mode, Hofmeister added, just like those already online at Speedware. HP's licensing agreement restricted its software exchange to only the HP-created freeware off of Jazz, so freeware from third parties is being pursued for inclusion at the Jazz rehosting sites.

The relicensing partners such as Speedware and OpenMPE have made the third party programs available through links to authors' sites such as the one Lars Appel maintains for Samba. Other third party freeware still coming online include ports from Mark Bixby, the C++ tools ported by Mark Klein and other contributions. "We're in the process of getting permission from these people to put their software on the OpenMPE site," Hofmeister said during an update at the meeting.

OpenMPE also made an opening bid for a role as repository for the MPE/iX read-only source code which HP has been licensing this year. The vendor announced a license program for the 3000's source in February, but little else can be discussed by organizations and companies applying for or receiving a license. HP will not announce who the license holders are, but said this spring that it would consider ways that licensees can inform customers about receiving a source code license.

OpenMPE wants to act as a repository for the code, although other companies have also applied for licenses. The source licensing process is a black box, with all terms, lists of applicants and status of applications shielded under HP's Confidential Disclosure Agreement.

According to HP's CDA, OpenMPE can't even reveal the cost of the source code license. Perdue said at the meeting that purchasing the MPE license, "plus some start up cash to manage it" will require $25,000. The group has its license application ready to file for the source, but it needs a check for HP, and so kicked off a fundraising effort. One attendee, Applied Technologies' Brian Edminster, was ready to write a $1,000 check to spark the drive for the OpenMPE license.

Get connected today for Community Meet

In about six hours, at 10 AM PDT, close to three dozen veterans, experts and members of the 3000 community meet in San Francisco. The event has gathered momentum over a very brief three weeks, and the turnout will rival any head count in any HP 3000 conference meeting room over the past four years.

Some community members who can't be in the room at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt wish for a live streaming feed, or some kind of a Webcast hookup. That's not going to happen today, but there's hope for future meetings. For today, Twitter might provide the best real-time blurbs. You can follow what's happening through the NewsWire's Twitter feed. Go to twitter.com, and just "follow" our account, 3000newswire.

Those tweets, as the Twitter messages are known, will be brief. (Despite what my writing might suggest, I know brief, since tweeting requires the same kind of skill I've employed in writing headlines for the last 30 years.) I enjoy the challenge of saying something meaningful in 140 characters or less per Twitter message. For a community that knows how to stay within the bounds of 132-column screens, Twitter will have a familiar feel. You can tweet back, too. If you're versed in Twitter's "hashtags" (think of them as database keys), I'll be using #3kmeet for today.

There will be more, as battery life, memory cards and concentration provide. We'll have recordings (podcasts on this site), video (on YouTube) and photos to share, some more real-time than others. If you don't Twitter, consider signing on today (it's free) and following the feed. It takes an real-life event to spark a stream of tweets. We're glad to have an audience.

There's also time to participate if you're within a short drive of the hotel in Burlingame. In person, as we all know, is the richest experience.

You can register online (with details at the link), or just show up for the dinner in the evening at the hotel. I hope to see you there, snap your picture, and share an update or a story. Stay tuned, as we TV-era folks used to hear.

Speedware opens doors to Jazz rehosting

Speedware has announced the latest phase of its rollout of re-hosted programs from the HP Jazz site, a software resource that HP relicensed to two vendors this spring. Client Systems made the first effort at supplying a Jazz site earlier this year, followed by a set of migration training modules that Speedware put online. Now Speedware has extended its 3000 training resources to include freeware created by HP for the 3000 -- plus access to programs supplied by the community.

One notable addition to the 3000 Web resource family is this Third Party Utilities section at the Speedware site. Speedware's Nicolas Fortin explained these are links or files that were once located on HP's Jazz site but not provided to licensees by HP. This software includes shareware files created by Mark Bixby and Lars Appel, the two most prolific authors of open source, shareware utilities for the 3000. Speedware pursued the programs from these developers, linking to Appel's software and hosting the Bixby programs.

Fortin said that hosting these programs, along with what he calls the largest set of white papers for 3000s, requires more than hosting and creating links. There's an ongoing stewardship required to re-host the resource which HP once maintained as Jazz.

"Sometime in the near future, we’ll add a few more files to the Third Party Utilities section from Mark Bixby," he said. "Although the Jazz content is mostly static, in reality from time to time we might find ourselves improving it based on specific user requests, if it can help the community. For example, already a user e-mailed us to report that one of the tar files in the HP Software section was corrupted (the file was given to us that way). We managed to re-create that tar file by finding the content and re-packaging it, so now it’s available."

Fortin said that both Appel and Bixby "say they were happy to see the site go live." It's important to keep the work of these two engineers in the orbit of Planet 3000, since their contributions linked the platform with modern networking and Internet services. Bixby's Apache port and Appel's Samba port probably qualify among the more important software releases for the 3000 during the late '90s.

The launch that went live last Friday is the second phase of Speedware's HP site material relocation. HP Transition courses went online at Speedware this spring, and the MPE-to-HP-UX cross-reference tools will appear next. "It took more time than we expected," Fortin said, "but we decided to spend some additional effort to provide the community with some extra value-add, in addition to the content provided to us by HP."

New clouds conjure up established IT needs

Cloud computing will require just as many sound IT practices as anything operating at an internal datacenter today. But a pair of key offerings should be at the top of the list for any HP 3000 customer who's considering a shift to the cloud when their datacenter goes virtual, hosted and maintained by outside resources.

Security becomes essential in the cloud picture to a degree far above everyday operations. A company's sensitive and competitive data, from HR profiles to sales reports, will all pass through a network more easily exposed to breaches. A cloud computing resource needs to pass muster on elements such as datacenter door access, or security of any wireless networks at the datacenter. Donnie Poston of the Support Group inc, a vendor that's moving toward more cloud services in the 3000 community, outlined the top three elements tSGi considers important in providing cloud computing.

"The top three things that anyone has to provide are security of access, a 24x7 uptime and access to data, and adequate bandwidth," he said. If a customer is putting its critical applications into the cloud, these elements can be guaranteed with a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

SLAs with outsource agencies might be new to the 3000 customer still operating in a localized datacenter environment. Connectivity guarantees are part of remote hosting services from vendors such as DST Health Solutions. DST is a Business Process Outsourcer, the type of supplier that hosts servers and systems for clients in the healthcare industry. In 2006 DST purchased Amisys, the largest healthcare software vendor in the 3000 community.

3000 customers who face migration as an inevitability could shop patiently for cloud services and get more value than moving next year. An SLA signed in 2011 is likely to have more offered for less subscription fees than a deal during 2010. The hard deadline for HP support customers arrives on Jan. 1, 2011. The more traditional a cloud based solution's software — SAP, QAD, IFS for manufacturers, for example — the more there's to gained from waiting.

Those solutions will have to work hard to compete with open source cloud services, according to tSGi's Sue Kiesel. "If you look at open source, we already have a way of getting a low-cost entry into this environment," she said. "Open source is one of the things that's making cloud computing as viable as it is today."

The Support Group is working on a complete open source cloud computing offer, she added, including Customer Relationship Management, Demand Management, analytics to serve Business Intelligence needs, tools for Business Process Management. Desktop tools will be available that "look just like Word, and just like PowerPoint, so you can't see the difference anymore."

The tSGi team envisions specialization in sectors such as geographical location, business sector and even service to government agencies. In the US that last category got its first dedicated cloud provider from a surprising source: the government itself. Apps.gov opened for business this week to supply business apps, cloud IT services, productivity apps and social media apps to US government customers. The Federal government has a CIO in Vivek Kundra who said in a press release yesterday

Apps.gov is starting small – with the goal of rapidly scaling it up in size. Along the way, we will need to address various issues related to security, privacy, information management and procurement to expand our cloud computing services.

Will we see you one week from today?

The plans and processes are in place for a lively HP e3000 Community Meet one week from today. I hope to talk with many of you at the one-day event being held at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt Hotel Sept. 23. There's still room in the room, including a lunch and networking, as well as updates and a dinner afterward. You can register online.

The program has been firmed up with updates from Transoft and OpenMPE. But aside from these presentations, there's a value in the $30 that 30-50 attendees are paying for a day with breakfast and lunch provided. If you're at the Meet, business and engagements can get green-lit.

"I just made time and registered for the HP e3000 Community Meeting," reported Ralph Berkebile of Data Management Associates today. "I look forward to the research discussions, briefings and socializing with the associates remaining in the HPe3000 community!"

Other 3000 professionals will be on hand to explore ways to work together, either offering their services or talking of engagements where they'll need help.

Long-time 3000 pro Bruce Hobbs is justifying a trip up from the LA area to do "mainly networking. I may take a run at [promoting] my interest in Ruby, Rails, PostgreSQL, and see if anyone needs any COBOL folks." There's a mix of classic skills and new technologies that's a good blueprint for a valuable future.

Hobbs said that he's learned personal links earn nearly all new jobs. "I came across something recently reporting that only one out of nine positions is obtained through any of the job search Web sites," he said. "Seems like the overwhelming majority of successes occur through personal contacts."

The meeting is also going to include some discussion, at the end of the day, about organizing a "Bang and Not a Whimper" event for next year when HP closes up the remains of its 3000 business. The complete schedule as of this week:

9.30    Registration     (Breakfast provided)
10.30    Welcome        (Alan Yeo)
10.40    Chris Koppe        (Speedware)
11.00    Michael Marxmeier    (Eloquence)
11.15    Donna Hofmeister    (OpenMPE)
11.30    Networking Break
12.15    Birket Foster        (MBFoster)
12.30    Alan Yeo        (ScreenJet)
12.45    Lunch
01.45    Rene Nunnington    (Transoft)
02.00    David Floyd        (The Support Group)
02.15    Ron Seybold        (3000 Newswire)
02.30    Homesteading Roundtable
03.00    Networking Break
03.45    Migration Roundtable
04.15    HP User Group    (Chris Koppe)
04.25    Closing

Even though networking is scheduled, attendees will step out of the room to connect even while presentations are on offer. Starting at 6 PM, says organizer Alan Yeo, is an "Open Invitation HP3000 Social Gathering in the bar at the Hyatt. All are welcome, and we understand that the bar does a reasonable selection of food." Some of the community is likely to show up only for the networking and gathering in the evening.

With every passing year the virtual networking tools improve. But no Twitter feed, live streaming of a panel discussion or Webcast can offer all the depth of an in-person talk with a colleague, partner or supplier. I'll have my own 15 minutes to share more about the online community offerings and how to use them more skillfully. I hope to see you in person at the year's largest 3000 event.

Counting on clouds to save green?

You have to go back to the veterans of timesharing with 3000s to find reality about cloud computing potential. Hewlett-Packard is pitching this concept -- sometimes called Software as a Service (SaaS). But companies of an average size may not see much savings, according to the Support Group inc's Sue Kiesel.

We talked with tSGi after we asked 3000 partners how much cloud they expected to cover the community with in the year to come. A few companies reported they'd spread a few clouds, tSGi among them. You'll want to have an extensive IT operation to count on the bottom-line greenback savings. And if you're not a Fortune 1000 company? The services will get updated on the big boys' schedule.

"They roll out the upgrades and inform you that you will be going to the new release," Kiesel said. "They'll probably schedule the upgrade based on what a customer the size of GE wants." You may be able to push back if you're of a certain size, but that size is big.

Not upgrading is a common choice, especially for the ERP customer like the ones that tSGi serves. Too much customization of an app makes a careful IT manager look hard at the work it will take to catch up to an upgraded version.

This disconnect between traditional app management and the easy promises of the cloud will keep skies pretty clear for HP 3000 sites -- even those that are migrating and can get a better match between their local hosts and the ones up in the cloud. ERP has been more fraught with customization than most other business segments.

The flip side of the cloud question is how much those SaaS clouds will save the big customers that are running the release schedule. "You won't get the cost savings at that level if you're the size of a GE," Kiesel said. "If you go into the cloud what you're usually saving are capital expenditures, which are very small."

HP counts some pretty large wins in cloud computing, organizations like the US Department of Defense. The adopters are few in number at this point. Clouds operate under subscription-based payments, and "the subscription fees are going to be way up there for a General Electric," Kiesel said. That outlay might even offset the savings of reducing local headcount in IT, which is another cloud promise.

tSGi operates another aspect of a cloud offering, managing HP 3000s installed at the firm's datacenter and operated on behalf of remote clients who connect over networks. This removes the 3000 from daily maintenance, and in the case of tSGi even gives the customer extra support for the ERP applications on the hosted systems. It can even give a company more time to complete a migration. That's important for some, now that HP's 2010 support deadline is only about 15 months away.

In a relocation of host model, a customer can benefit from access to the IT talent they can't afford to get, Kiesel said. "I can afford it as a provider because I have 100 customers," she explained. "My little 10-seat customer can't afford that talent because he's a small business."

Consolidating many small IT operations through a cloud-like service gives the planet a boost, to be sure. A massive footprint of a large IT shop is easy to target. But the combined carbon footprints of computer rooms dwarf the footprints of autos, Kiesel said.

"You might say that you have a small footprint, and what can you really save. But if you put 100 companies together, and you have a bottom line that depends on how efficient you can run your [cloud] services for them, you have a chance of minimizing the footprint for a lot of people. That's computing green."

Industry veterans mark 1984 milestones

Editor's note: In late summer of 1984 I started my career covering the HP 3000 marketplace. To help commemorate those 25 years, I asked more than a score of community members from that era to recall what their 3000 careers looked like back then.

Alan Yeo, ScreenJet founder - In 1984 I had just gone freelance for a contract paying “Great Money” and spent the whole year on a Huge Transact Project. Actually it was the rescue of a Huge Transact Project, one that had taken two elapsed and probably 25 man-years and at that point was about 10 percent working. A couple of us were brought in on contract to turn it around. We did, and we used to joke that we were like a couple of Samurai Coders brought in to Slash and Burn all before us. (I think Richard Chamberlin may have just starred in the hit TV epic Samurai at that time.)

    We were working on a Series 70, configured as the biggest 3000 in our region of the UK (apart from the one at HP itself). We used to have lots of HP SEs in and out to visit -- not because it was broken but just to show it to other customers. That was the year we started hearing rumors of PA-RISC and the new “Spectrum” HP 3000s. It unfortunately took a few more years for them to hit the streets.

    I have lots of good memories of HP SEs from that time. HP employed some of the best people, and a lot of them were a great mix between Hardware Engineers, Software Engineers and Application Engineers. Great people to work with who sort of espoused the HP Way, and really made you want to be associated with HP. Where did they go wrong?

Doug Greenup, Minisoft founder -- In 1984 Minisoft was just one year old. We had just begun marketing our first product, a word processor for the HP 3000 known as Miniword. At that time a lot of HP 3000s only did 2400 baud, so typeahead was pretty important. Users were losing characters because they typed too fast. Typeahead helped to solve that problem. Because the HP 3000 did not have typeahead we had to manufacture a little box that sat between the HP3000 and the terminal we called a “SoftBox.” One of our best moments was when we were able to get 9600 baud on a serial connection.

    Also at that time we were timesharing on an HP 3000 Series III with another company called Western Data. The spinoff of that company became Walker, Richer and Quinn, the makers of Reflection. Marty Quinn came into my office one day complaining that he couldn't develop from home. He had this piece of hardware called an IBM PC. I remember laughing at the thought of making this IBM PC look like an HP2622 block mode terminal. Marty went on to develop PC2622 which became Reflection.

    Minisoft 92 came about in 1986 when a fellow from England named Peter Gofton called me up and wanted to know if we would be interested in marketing his HP Terminal product. We saw the WRQ success and thought there might be an opportunity to sell a less expensive connectivity product. It turns out there was a nice market for a HP terminal emulator for around $95 per copy, the price we sold it at back in 1986. Reflection at the time was about three times the price.

Denys Beauchemin, MIS manager, backup vendor, developer and Interex chairman -- By 1984 I had been working on the HP 3000 for over seven years. I was at Northern Telecom in Montreal with a pair of Series 70. The Spectrum project was announced by HP at the same time as the cancellation of the Vision project, and the Series 70 got an upgrade to keep it viable for a few more years waiting for Spectrum.

Donna (Garverick) Hofmeister, SIGSYSMAN chair, Longs Drug developer/analyst, OpenMPE board director -- By 1984 I was two years out of college and working for the Army, tracking equipment readiness on a 3000. It was replaced by a Series 70, just about as soon as the 70s came out, too.  We were very proud of that system, because at time of delivery we were told it was the biggest 70 ever made.
    Over the years we pushed that box pretty hard. It was very much a case of “if you build [the application] they will come.” We gave weapon system managers on-line access to their data - something they had never had.  And when we started graphing the trend data - oh boy! You'd think we had built a better mouse trap! I was particularly fond of the DSG/3000 decision support graphics application. By the time the Army and I parted ways, I think we had a grand 6GB of disc attached to the system.

Chris Bartram, 3k Associates founder, NewsWire Webmaster - In 1984 I had just taken a fulltime system programming job on the 3000 after deciding to give up on college for a while. My work there inspired me to start 3k a few years later in 1987. That was the year when I bought my first 3000, a 3000/37 Mighty Mouse which cost me about $10,000.

Gilles Schipper, founder of third party support firm GSA, NewsWire columnist -1984 was one year after I left HP and started out on my own. At that time, MPE/VE was starting to be out in full force after HP had just announced the 42 (as well as the 48 and 68). Shortly thereafter, as regular contributor to The Chronicle, I wrote an article entitled “The HP3000 Series 41?” in which I suggested that lots of HP 3000 users were being shortchanged by HP with the Series 40 to 42 “upgrade kit,” because it did not include the necessary CPU board replacement that actually made the upgrade complete.

Guy Smith, Chronicle columnist and founder of Silicon Support Strategies - Wow, where the hell was I in 1984?  Who the hell was I in 1984? I was running a couple of boxes at Canaveral Air Force Station at that time. 16-bits and many megabytes of RAM were considered serious hardware (which my laptop that I'm writing with mocks, smugly superior with its two 64-bit CPUs and 8GB of fast RAM).

    Important at that point in time was the growing number and sophistication of HP Users Groups. The Florida Users Group was particularly vibrant and was a great feeding ground for young and hungry bitheads like me.  They were small, intimate and high powered, allowing me to meet and discuss HP 3000 innards with the likes of David Greer, Vladimir Volokh and other gurus. Interex later became the locus, but regional groups were the launching pads for most of us in 1984. NASA at Kennedy Space Center and neighboring Cape Canaveral Air Force Station had many HP 3000s. I know the concentration of machines and talent there influenced FLORUG.

Jeff Vance, HP developer for MPE, community liaison - In 1984 I was working in the MPE XL (probably really named HPE at the time) lab. It was the year that Spectrum (which became PA-RISC) won the battle over the Vision architecture, and we re-wrote much of the low-level OS to Spectrum, while simply porting the higher level code.
     The “HPE Cookbook,” written by the late Chris Mayo, was “published” May 15, 1984. The table of contents shows: Development Environment Map, CookMOM - How to Build “Hi Mom,” CookHPE, Useful Directories, User Information, Spooling, Customizing Makefiles for HPE, and RDB - The Remote Debugger.

Community Meet assembles members, polls

The HP 3000 Community Meet is now less than two weeks away, but the Sept. 23 event is gathering its content and taking $30 registrations for the free lunch -- along with what's becoming a full day of talks and networking.

Organizer Alan Yeo reports that the code to snag a discounted room at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt is "HP3000 Meeting", which he says will be activated at the registration desk no later than Friday morning. Call hotel reservations direct at 650-347-1234 and mention the code to get your rate. (After 25 years of travel, booking through the hotel is a habit I practice to assure the very best stay.) You can also register online at the Hyatt's site and use code G-SCRJ to get the $109 rate.

A 6:30 dinner will follow a day that looks to be starting before 10 AM and wrapping up late in the afternoon. Speakers now include the Support Group inc, which is assembling cloud computing services for the 3000 community, both homesteading and migrating sites. Connectivity software supplier Minisoft reports that it's sending its chief developer for middleware products to the Meet.

There's also a way to participate in having your voice heard. An online survey, prepared by MB Foster's Birket Foster, asks eight simple yes-no questions. But you can also add your comments along with a quick response, if you're interested. I hope you'll speak up at the Meet's survey page soon.

The Connect HP user group is accepting credit cards to operate the registration process, support from an organization that will be helmed by Speedware's Chris Koppe starting next year. Speedware's got updates to share at the meeting, as does MB Foster and Mike Marxmeier of Marxmeier Software (creators of the Eloquence database and co-hosts). Migration supplier Transoft is also on board as a sponsor and presenter.

These updates will be brief -- 15 minutes or so -- to keep the day open for informal networking, reports Yeo. The organizers were also working to arrange brief talks from Allegro Consultants, providers of support for homesteading 3000 sites as well as HP-UX users.

Roundtable discussions are set for the afternoon to cover both homesteading plans and migration issues. And by request, I'll be making a short update on community trends in the afternoon, too. I'm taking the bullet of talking just after that lunch, so I'm practicing my showmanship by calling on long-ago theatrical moxie. (That all means I'm trying to keep things lively enough to ward off naps in the audience.)

Speedware illuminates endings for 3000s

Hewlett-Packard calls 2010's last month the "end of life" for the HP 3000, and community partner Speedware is carrying the term forward to 3000 customers, too. The vendor that supports HP 3000 migrations also supports 3000 applications for homesteaders, but 2010 is sparking a discount in the cost of both its migration and support services.

Marketing VP Chris Koppe says there's more than one way to view what will happen at the close of 2010, but end-of-life (EOL) is a valid definition for some customers. He adds that community members are counting on another HP support extension.

"It's time to raise some of the alarm bells for those who haven't acted yet," he says, "and say there's no more extensions." Speedware believes the hardware still working at 3000 sites is physically aging — because HP hasn't updated servers since 2003 -- and it puts a lot of weight behind the end of HP's support services in December, 2010. A discount off future migration or app support engagements with Speedware is underway through the end of 2009.

Like others who are serving customers in the community, Speedware knows of large companies still working with their 3000s, despite business continuity and risk management issues. "Some are just slower to act than others," he said.

The exit of an HP support option at the end of 2010 means more to larger customers, Koppe admits, than smaller sites. Companies that homestead don't rely on HP as a central IT resource the way these larger, brand-name organizations do. Homesteaders are moving to third party support firms now, he says, "since it's wiser not to do that at the last minute."

For the migration-bound site, time is growing very short to meet an end of 2010 deadline. Although migrations can be accomplished in under one year, 15 to 18 months is more of an average. Testing of migrations -- either the lift-and-shift of proven apps, or kick-starting replacement programs in a new environment -- takes more than half the time of a migration. Companies might be tempted to compress their test cycles in order to start later than this fall. That's another risk than an earlier start can help avoid.

Koppe says Speedware wants to offer a migration solution that fits all sizes of companies, not just those with deep pockets. "Companies that have tighter budgets tend to be more open to combinations of outsourcing and in-house resources," he said. Speedware's offer is to discount its Detailed Modernization Analysis, a first step in what it calls modernization rather than migration. A Detailed Modernization Analysis (DMA) and earns an investment credit worth up to 50 percent of the cost of your DMA, applicable towards the cost of a Speedware migration.

The investment credit offer is only available through December 31, but a reduction in costs could start some migrations moving. "There are five different tiers of resource offerings geared to every level of budget," Koppe says, "because some people don't have the financial budget to outsource everything, but they can get the physical resources to do it. They're looking for a more cost-effective or cheaper solution."

While every migration manager wants to be successful, there's two levels of accountability to that success. Quality of migrated code is one level, and then there's "being accountable for the outcome of the project: managing it and guiding the customer in their testing activities," Koppe says. Managing preparation for deployment, preparation for transitioning an organization, embedding staff onsite  -- these are on the high end of Speedware's five levels of engagement.

Low end modernization might include teaching a customer how to use transition tools. "It's do it yourself, but with some education on how to do it," he says. Then there's mass migration of code, handed back to the customer. Both of these levels put the accountability of outcome on the customer's shoulders, "and I've seen customers very successful with do-it-yourself projects," Koppe says.

Quarter-century on, 3000 gurus recall

As part of a celebration of my first 25 years of HP 3000 coverage, we invited community members to talk about what their 1984 experience felt like while working with the 3000. Here's our first installment to show how far the community has evolved -- and what sorts of challenges we've left behind.

User groups plus the press lifted the 3000

By Steve Cooper
Allegro Consultants

    I started my career on the HP 3000 in 1977. At that point, the Series II was mature enough to build “real” systems on, but reliability, performance, and bug-free software were attributes we could still only dream about. Much of our dream did slowly get realized, and by 1984, we reached a point where the HP 3000 family of computers truly represented a viable platform as a general-purpose business computer. Now an actual family of computers, one could select from small to large systems, finding the price-point that one could justify (and afford). Systems that used to only stay up for days were now staying up for months at a time. And, one could build complex business systems in COBOL and Image on top of MPE, and not run into insurmountable bugs.

    But equally important was the emergence of the rest of the infrastructure necessary to confidentially choose that platform for your company. Third party software companies continued to spring up, but now they were showing the strength and perseverance needed to convince companies that they were in it for the long haul. “Maybe we can actually trust this Guatemalan with a privileged-mode program that manipulates databases,” we believed, “and maybe we can trust this Canadian company with an editor that makes the 3000 so easy to use.”

    Of course, an essential part (perhaps THE essential part) of this infrastructure was an active and vital user community. This took shape in two forms: First was the User Group, eventually called Interex, and the affiliated RUGs (Regional Users Groups). Now, kindred spirits could get together and meet face-to-face, to share best practices, horror stories, and programs they had written, to learn about these new third party products, and to present a common front to advocate to HP on the direction we hoped they would take the 3000 and MPE.

Second was the press. The 3000 and its community had reached a point where things that happened here were actually “news” and we had “reporters” reporting on them. And not just snippets in ComputerWorld. We had entire publications devoted to the HP 3000, and journalists like Ron Seybold, reporting the news and sharing their observations on it. These two additions to the community gave a legitimacy and empowerment to the community that can't be underestimated.

   1984 was also the year that Stan Sieler decided to leave HP and join me in forming Allegro Consultants. I wanted to keep doing what we were doing at my old company, even though that company now wanted to go in a new direction. I thought we had an understanding of “things 3000” that would allow us to tune systems around the world, and produce software products that could make the 3000 do things that had it had never done before. We must have done something right; we're still doing it 25 years later.

SFO Community Meet firms up its program, sparks new Transition survey

The HP 3000 Community Meet on Sept. 23 is shaping up quickly, considering the event was only a gleam in the eye of organizer Alan Yeo in mid-August. The one-day event at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt is gathering steam because an independent management pace speeds its growth. A larger organization might take months to assemble such an event.

There's less than a month left before the 10AM start. But sponsors and supporters are pitching in. Speedware's Chris Koppe has engaged the Connect HP user group's Web services to register attendees. (Koppe is the president-elect of Connect). By this afternoon, a visit to the Web address from the '07 Meet, hpmigrations.com/sfevent, should include a link to a registration page at the Connect servers. Credit cards are accepted for the nominal $30 fee.

There's also online polling in place today in support of the event. Birket Foster of MB Foster has set up a survey that anyone in the community can take -- reporting on whether they can attend, plus taking answers to fun questions like "Have you been able to establish a sustainable homesteading plan?" The e-mail and communications outsourcer Constant Contact has a method to keep the polls from being gamed, even while the answers and comments can be anonymous.

It all seems in the spirit of good cheer and dedication to realistic Transition that will propel the Meet. Oh, and there's a sports bar/restaurant at the Hyatt for an after-Meet dinner to help raise cheers, too.

A $30 sign-up fee is in keeping with the 2007 meet, just a nominal charge to get a little skin in the game for the event to lock in attendance. The free lunch is hosted by Alan Yeo of ScreenJet and Michael Marxmeier of Marxmeier Software. In addition to Speedware and MB Foster, K-12 app vendor QSS's founder Duane Percox is among the event's supporters. The one-day affair will have brief (10-15 minute) update talks from leading 3000 community resources such as Allegro Consultants and the Support Group, inc. These are resources who are assisting both migration and homesteading customers.

The meeting will give 3000 users a place to network and catch up on the latest details and stories of Transition. There will be that talk about sustaining homestead plans, too.

You can get on board by making your hotel reservations at the Hyatt for a $109 room rate for the meeting, if you need to stay overnight. Call hotel reservations direct at 650-347-1234 and mention the 3000 Meet to get your rate.

We'll have more details on the day's program, but a major attraction is meeting to network with 3000 resources face to face, be they customers or consultants or suppliers.

Emulators will arrive too late for some

Even as several vendors move into testing for an HP 3000 hardware emulator, the product will arrive long after it could have helped some sites. Edward Berner of Yosemite Community College couldn't hold out, even though he said as far back as 2006 he could use such a product.

Fortunately (for the college, but unfortunately for the emulator companies) we've finally managed to retire our HP 3000. It's been powered off for about eight months now (and was inactive for a while before that).  Once it's been off for a full year, I'll start advocating that we sell the hardware to a vendor or something.  After that we can rent a system, or use a service if we need to refer to something from our backup tapes.

The delays in emulation made up the dread that 3000 advocates and advisors felt about the solution. HP had a change of heart, according to one emulator supplier, about creating a license mechanism for emulation. After awhile Hewlett-Packard began to see a large share of the migrating 3000 sites were choosing a replacement system without an HP badge. That's what happened at Yosemite, where the Sun rose out in the west.

Berner said the college made a transition to Sun Microsystems servers from the 3000. (We know, there's a bit of another migration issue in that environment as well -- depending on what Oracle decides to do about the Sun server business it will acquire along with Sun's software.)

Berner said HP's exit announcement in '01 didn't spark the rise of Sun at the college. "Our decision to migrate was pretty much independent of HP's announcement," he said, "though I guess the announcement probably did provide additional support for the decision." A Series 979, running one CPU and two in-house apps, was powered off at the start of 2009.

Our main application, DSK, was a vendor product, but they went out of business in the mid 90's and we maintained it in-house since. Our payroll application was separate and also in-house, being based on a system we got from another institution in ancient times. We migrated to Datatel and Oracle running on Sun hardware.  The selection of Datatel software was the result of a large RFP process. The selection of Sun hardware was the result of a bidding process.

I probably shouldn't get into comparing the different applications.

The migration was largely done in-house, Berner added, and retraining was necessary.

An emulator wouldn't have kept MPE/iX and those applications in production use at Yosemite. "Our main use for an emulator would have been for running the HP 3000 software for a couple years after the migration was mostly done, for historical data and while the last few stray things were migrated," Berner said. "The attraction being that a 1- or 2-processor Intel system is a lot smaller than a 979 -- and the HP 3000 A Series always seemed too expensive to me."

A price point for emulators will be difficult to set at first. Some companies homesteading on the 3000 report they don't migrate for budgetary reasons. Berner said a price point of "less than the 3000 hardware support contract" fee would have worked for him. That might be a lean business incentive to launch emulator products.

Even while a couple of companies have pledged upwards of a $1 million to invest in an emulator for their 3000 operations, the IT managers who understand the value of emulation are sometimes moving on before their 3000s migrate. Paula Brinson, the datacenter operations manager who we quoted in our Monday story as saying "sorrowfully, I might have to use an emulator," won't have to oversee such a step. She's now retired from the Hampton Roads Sanitation District in Virginia after 30 years of IT service. As of this spring, a 3000 application very popular with the users remained online at HRSD.

Generating your Legacy to Improve

NewsWire Editorial

This summer has been a season of celebration for me. I finished my first novel, Viral Times, and I marked 25 years of writing stories about the HP 3000. But between those highlights arrived the sweetest event, our first grandson. Baby Noah Seybold was born into his grandparents' lives on July 19. Noah, a marvel in miniature as elegant as any RISC chip design, is a chip off this old block, a generation I think of as Seybold 3.0. (From the left in the picture, there's Seybold 1.0, Noah, and Seybold 2.0, our son and new father Nick.)

  Noah's beaming dad was not yet two years old when I started making HP my life's career. I might say that journalism has been my life's work, but the tender cries and hummingbird heartbeat of a newborn boy that I heard once again give me perspective. My partner Abby and I -- well, all grandparents -- might see their life's work as generating a legacy, improving one generation at a time.

  Technology is as different in the birthing room as it differs in your computer room, comparing the mid-1980s (Nick's birth) with Noah's 2009 debut. Being born is improved in its integration of family (like your networking), where the whole clan of Noah's mom Elisha's folks and Nick's family could visit the little boy within two hours of his arrival.

    There was the in-room warming table, the more precise monitoring (not an HP instrument anymore), the in-room staff chosen for emotional coaching as well as medical savvy. A midwife and a duola coach brought this boy into our world, with nary a doctor needed (but one on call).

   After our glorious tears on Noah's first afternoon, Abby and I floated back home (a car was involved, I think) to embrace what sparked the pride and joy of the day. We brought up Nick with attention and ardor to hope for this day when a new generation would join us. Our lives have swelled with a new understanding of the word legacy, a word used as an epithet during the years of my career.

   As leaders, creators and devoted humans we all strive to leave a legacy. It must be something of great value if so many pursue it. But as you may know from either grand-parenthood or a life working through change, a legacy must contribute to whatever follows. After 25 years of learning computing, and teaching it through stories, I understand how we build a legacy one bedtime story, program design or midnight support call at a time. Generations grow stronger when they're lifted onto an older shoulder. Older clears a path for newer, which enables the latest.

  The meaning of accomplishments long past can elude any of us, until we grasp the long view. What sounds like Geezer IT Talk -- with fables of punch cards, tiny baud rates, or 11 platters to make up just 74MB of 3000 disc, is one kind of promise from the past to the future. We created those solutions, the veterans say in this issue, and you will solve similar problems too.

    Perhaps as the grandparents of new tech we have some fundamental to pass on for consideration. Abby and I visit the tiny lad in his nursery and relieve his mom, change him with practiced hands. We believe his little cries will subside because we remember our own success with babies. The greatest legacy we can leave, it seems on those days, is the certainty that life will work out alright even when it's an unfamiliar puzzle to be solved.

    Seeing a family into a fresh generation is more profound than carrying computing from into cloud services. Those machines don't have souls or hearts or dreams, except for whatever we vest them with while we grow wiser using them. In time, the technology advances on a pace outside our control, just as independent as any young adult seeking love and adventure through scrapes with trouble and life lessons learned. My generation and yours believes we started the life the world's youth will know. But in truth, we too grew from a legacy left to us from elders loud, stubborn or wise.

    It was that word wise that made my voice shudder and my tears flow on our first afternoon in Noah's nursery. While he cooed and napped and stretched in my arms, I found a cherished story written by Margaret Wise Brown on his shelf. Her book The Runaway Bunny has never been out of print in 67 years, a continuing lifespan as remarkable as the HP 3000s. The story's simple words echoed while I read them to our grandson for the first of many times to come. Words, the fundamentals of any storyteller as well as basic units of data in the earliest 3000s, connect legacy with life or technology just unfolding. Believe in the value of your ability to learn while you practice sharing what you know. Such faith might form the older, steady shoulder that can help newborns grow.

Emulator history assists in HP licensing

Members of the HP 3000 community have doubted any hardware emulator would ever surface, often pointing to HP's reluctance to make a license possible. More than five years elapsed between HP's initial promise of a virtual MPE/iX license for PC-based servers and the mechanism of right-to-use licensing. Even when HP issued an FAQ on the emulator, users didn't believe the concept could pass HP's legal muster.

"HP has demonstrated an intractable institutional resistance to admitting that the HP 3000 was a viable platform," said James Byrne, IT manager at 3000 shop Harte-Lyne. "This cannot but continue to have a baleful influence on efforts at cooperation with HP by those producing and intending to use said (non-extant) emulators."

Harte-Lyne was using a pair of Series 918 3000s when Byrne cast doubt on an emulator's future. Other long-time advocates of the 3000 described the concept as "an emulator that will never happen," according to Joe Dolliver, owner of consultancy e3k Solutions.

But early this year Dolliver also said he had "two part-time 3000 clients that have no Plan B, and I will be supporting them for several years to come." lf licensing can be arranged to allow third-party tools to run in emulation, such clients could find a Plan B in an emulator.

"If an emulator existed and cost less than the hardware support contract for our 3000," said Edward Berner of Yosemite Community College, "then I could save money and reclaim some floor space at the same time."

What's been key to keeping the dream alive is vendors' history with HP working on emulation. In addition to the HP 1000 experience from Strobe Data's emulator product, there's been others. Robert Boers, the CEO of Stromasys who recently said the company has worked out its licensing plans regarding MPE/iX, reports that doubt and skepticism have followed emulator sales ever since his firm started selling them for the Digital VMS market.

"That's one of the problems that we have struggled with for years," Boers said. "When you talk to people they say, 'It can't be done. It's too good to be true.' We've had to pull out our Intel laptop and show them that VMS is running on it."

Technical hurdles are a serious consideration, but few in the 3000 community doubted that an emulator was an engineering impossibility. "It's basically a mathematical model of the hardware," Boers said of his product. "The Gartner Group now has a name for it, cross-platform virtualization." His company has made its bones with a VAX-Alpha emulator that he says is so accurate "you can run [VAX] hardware diagnostics on it."

That kind of technical exactitude will be needed to ensure elements such as TurboIMAGE continue to operate as applications expect. Boers said of his product, "Since we re-create an abstraction layer of the hardware, I wouldn't expect anything not to run. There is no fundamental difference except that some of the components -- normally the IO -- will run a lot faster."

The performance of the emulator will be determined by the host hardware, which Boers says is typically driven by Intel or AMD 64-bit processors. HP has not mandated that the hosting hardware carry an HP label to be eligible for a license. Several technical experts in the community say there's no way to test for the presence of an HP PC on startup. That kind of test took place in 3000 hardware to ensure MPE/iX wouldn't boot on another HP PA-RISC server.

There's many a potential slip between lip and cup remaining for any 3000 hardware emulator. Performance might be an issue, but the accelerating power curve of Intel and AMD systems could well resolve that issue over the next year. HP's licensing intentions will be tested, too, once Stromasys attempts to sell the product -- since the third party is a player in the MPE/iX licensing process. The HP Right to Use (RTU) license controls the operation of MPE/iX on non-3000 hardware. From the FAQ of early this spring:

An MPE/iX license can be transferred from an existing HP e3000 system to an emulator, using the  current Software License Transfer (SLT) process. A customer needing additional MPE/iX licenses will be able to purchase an MPE/iX RTU license through the AD377A product in conjunction with an emulator product through the end of 2010.

HP's got a mechanism to sell additional licenses for HP 3000 implementations -- virtual 3000s -- to a customer who's already got a 3000 running. That AD377A product has seen its price drop since it was first introduced in 2008. For some customers, the cost of adding 3000 licenses could make for a better Plan B than no plan at all.

"So this emulator would act as a virtual HP 3000, and the OS and apps would actually live on a 21st century piece of hardware?," asked John Stevens of Take Care of IT. "I have to think that this would have a market. If the price (and quality of implementation) is less that than of a true migration, there’s your answer."

Customers who would rather be migrated could even comprise some of the emulator user base. "Sorrowfully, I might have to use an emulator," said Paula Brinson, the Datacenter Operations Manager for Hampton Roads Sanitation District. "The legacy system is getting expensive due to floor space costs. Maintenance is with third parties now, but is still a fairly significant expense, and I have cancelled as many software contracts as I can and still operate. So emulation may be the way to go."

3000 community to meet again in SF(O)

HP 3000 community members, both those migrating and those who are not, are invited to the second bi-annual HP 3000 Community Meet. On Wednesday, Sept. 23 there will be a single day of free lunch, networking, and 10-minute updates about the state of the computer still playing a significant role in companies and careers. Imagine, an in-person meeting of 3000 users and vendors in 2009. In 2007 it seemed unlikely that a 3000 meeting could take place, after all of HP's warnings about 2006 being the 3000's end of life. Save the date and meet at a rare event.

The virtually-free meeting is scheduled to take place at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt, a swell hotel on Bayshore Highway just a few minutes south of the SFO Airport. The hotel operates a free shuttle to the BART station at the airport, according to organizer Alan Yeo of ScreenJet. Along with Marxmeier Software's Mike Marxmeier, Yeo is "standing a lunch" for up to 50 attendees, plus organizing a "cash bar" dinner that evening in the Hyatt's sports bar/restaurant. $109 rooms are being arranged for out of town attendees. We'll be there, and hope to see you too.

The event is wrapped around re-connecting with community members, the kind of networking that can be tough to accomplish at a Very Large User Group Event. The e3000, as HP and partners still like to call it, can hold on until migrations are completed or homesteading sustaining plans are in place. Yeo reminded attendees at the previous Community Meet by the Bay in '07 that the "e" in 3000 represents the essence of the computer's value.

Yeo, Marxmeier, and QSS founder Duane Percox mounted the '07 meet with all due speed, announcing in September and gathering in mid-November. This year's event, with a late-morning start, then lunch followed by updates, followed by an optional dinner, will come together even faster. The community is counting on that essential element to make that Wednesday coalesce.

"I've been thinking about the naming of the e3000," Yeo said when the '07 event wrapped up. "I believe that 'e' stands for enduring, because the 3000 has lasted a darn sight longer than HP expected." Between 40 and 50 community members were on hand back then. Speedware will be hosting a registration site, Yeo said. Attendance at the '07 event cost a grand $20, which earned a commemorative polo shirt in return. Stand by for program details, and book your flights if you're more than a car drive away.

So there is such a thing as a free lunch, perhaps a testament to that enduring value of the HP 3000.

Lawson leads Aussie ERP firm to iSeries

A longtime HP 3000 customer headquartered in Australia is heading away from their HP 3000 ERP suite, taking a trip down the midrange lane to IBM's iSeries. The 3000 customer that's been in business since 1946 says they're looking for better technology to handle business growth.

RYCO Hydraulics, with operations in North and South America, Europe and Asia as well as Australia, will be moving to a Lawson Software ERP solution to replace its HP 3000 applications. The company will be serviced by Lawson along with IBM Partner Synergy Plus. The Lawson suite which will be installed during 2009 is QuickStep, software billed as easier to deploy than traditional ERP replacements used by manufacturing firms.

ERP has long been a core sector for the 3000 community, but the iSeries-AS/400 world counts tens of thousands of customers in manufacturing, too. Infor, which now owns the customer base and software rights to the MANMAN app for ERP, built its core business on the AS/400 marketplace. Even though the future of the iSeries looks sketchy to some veterans in that community, Lawson's suite operates in other environments as well. Cross-platform migrations -- where the initial deployment can be moved to another platform later with minimal fees and retooling -- are becoming a common strategy for 3000 sites looking for a change.

Australia has lost other HP 3000 customers over the past year or so. ING Software migrated its in-house apps to HP-UX servers using Speedware's migration services, citing a lack of HP lab support for patching its MPE/iX apps. Other companies Down Under point to a dearth of used systems and parts for their 3000s.

The QuickStep solution that's replacing 3000 software at RYCO is a recent addition to the Lawson product line, as well as an application that runs on platforms other that what IBM now calls the Series i. Lawson promotes QuickStep as an implementation of M3, formerly Intentia's Movex ERP suite, that starts to deliver in weeks instead of the usual ERP transition timeline of months. QuickStep is a "pre-configured" version of M3. Lawson calls the suite a low-risk solution.

"These are prototypes that can speed software implementation by pre-configuring 70-90 percent of specific processes within the applications," Lawson's QuickStep summary says. Lawson reported in a press release that it won RYCO's business by having a deeper understanding of the hydraulics firm's business sector than competing ERP suppliers.

But both Lawson and Synergy Plus also deploy their solutions on IBM systems other than the i -- notably the Series x for Linux, and Series p for IBM's Unix. According to the AS/400 news site IT Jungle, Lawson is retrenching this year, in part by acquiring the M3 suite that's more popular with Series i customers and those outside of the US.

Lawson is a major player in this IBM midrange market for integrated systems, whether those computers are called AS/400s, iSeries or Series i. It hosted an annual conference this year whose musical headliner was Don Felder, one of the founding members of The Eagles. While it's hard to imagine Lawson staying competitive with ERP vendors like SAP and Oracle without Series i growth, the vendor is positioned to transition its customers from any platform with slowing sales -- in the same way that it's moving RYCO off the HP 3000 in the months to come.

Connect changes user group operations

HP user group Connect has altered its business organization following the latest HP Technology Forum & Expo by transferring the group's services to its own operations. Connect had contracted with services company Smith-Bucklin for operational support until late June, giving that company the duties of managing a user expo and delivering products to members of the group. Smith-Bucklin manages the services of hundreds of user groups and associations.

But president Nina Buik said the Connect board of directors saw the trends in the user association business and made changes that created two full-time employees while ending the Smith-Bucklin services contract. "Managed services is now our previous business model," she said, "but we will not be a brick-and-mortar operation in the forseeable future. We changed our model at just the right time."

Computer user groups in the  industry are retrenching, adding alliances with other groups as Connect did last year, or expanding user bases such as the IBM COMMON group, which now serves Unix users along with its core AS/400 and iSeries customers. "We looked at a lot of lessons of the past, and what we need to guide us into the future," Buik said. "In our previous model we were getting pieces and parts of different people throughout a given day. In this new model we're getting 100 percent dedication." The group is now relying on its 14-member board of directors for management and tactical operations, in addition to the new employees.

The two full-time staffers are former board president Kristi Browder, who was IT director for Silicon Labs, and member services manager Erin Anderson. Both are based in Austin, Texas, where Browder worked at Silicon Labs. She's a 30-year IT customer of Digital, Compaq and now HP, in addition to years of work on the board of Encompass (one group of the Connect alliance).

But Connect's operations go beyond geographical locations such as local user groups, the national conference in Las Vegas, or 2008's international meeting in Germany. Buik bragged about 30,000 page views a month on its membership Web site, which serves HP users of Windows, HP-UX, Linux, OpenVMS and NonStop systems, along with other HP customers such as services and network management. About the only constituency not served directly are HP 3000 homesteaders, since many migrating 3000 sites are headed for the other HP platforms.

They are heading more slowly, like most of the world's businesses. "This economy has affected us just like any other business," Buik said. Attendance was down this year at the HPTF show -- Buik estimated 4,500 to 5,000 were on hand in Las Vegas, a decline of about 2,500 in part because of reduced HP attendance -- but she said the group plans to expand its product line. It even is considering expanding its printed publication in the future.

The tough news for Connect and other user groups is the decline in travel budgets and IT spending overall during 2009. Booth sales were down by 28 percent for the latest conference. But Connect doesn't rely on the revenue from the Tech Forum as heavily as the Interex user group counted upon its HP World show. By the end of Interex's run, HP World had become the tent pole of revenue for a brick-and-mortar operation with dozens of employees in a Silicon Valley office.

Connect wants no part of brick and mortar for now. Aside from Browder and Anderson, the rest of the work is fulfilled by outsourced CFO and IT services, some third-party publicity from Burson-Marsteller, as well as volunteers from a 13-member board of directors. Buik said Connect has reduced its expenses by 30 percent in dropping the Smith-Bucklin contracts and going to limited direct payroll.

Connect's board searched for an executive director among its membership, even while it reviewed a resume from a former executive director of another user association. Browder "not only was a member, but she understands the issues that an HP customer would face. She was also a leader of the organization, so it was a unique mix of skills she brought to us."

The user group is going to rely on that board for work, but Buik says the tactical knowledge of running a user group is part of Browder's experience. "Trust me, there's dirt under those fingernails," she said of Browder, such as work on event committees. Connect has hired a contractor to do its CFO work, not expecting its executive director to deliver those skills.

Buik asserts that the Connect board members differ from the directors at Interex, an organization that had a good array of technical and customer experience but had to rely on professional staff to service members with products such as conference, publications and Web resources. Each Connect director has "a deep knowledge of what goes on in a particular area of operations." The assignments aren't listed among the director biographies on the Connect site, but the group provided this breakdown of who's in charge of what duty.

Alan Dick – Director of Advocacy and SIGs
Steve Davidek – Director of Chapter Relations
Joe Ramos – Director Member Relations
Chris Koppe – Director of Vendor Relations,
     Chair of the Social Media Committee, VP/President Elect
Jay McLaughlin – Director of Marketing and Events
Brad Harwell –HP Executive Liaison
Scott Healy – Director of Business Development
Bill Johnson – Director of Technical Resource Committee
Johnny IP – Business Development Committee
Heinz-Hermann Adam – Chairman, Connect Germany
Leo Van Schie – Chairman, Connect Netherlands
Kristi Browder – Executive Director and COO
Nina Buik – Director of Media Relations, President
Glen Kuykendall – Director of Finance, Secretary Treasurer

Connect expects that directors will have a network of resources they can bring in to help service the needs in each expertise.The committees are comprised of "people who have done this kind of thing before, and can bring their acumen and expertise."

Management strategies aside, a user group is evaluated on its content and networking opportunities. Connect upgraded to the social networking developer Pluck earlier this year for the group's myCommunity Web site. It's offered Webcasts in 2009, will produce more of those next year with sponsors, and plans targeted events in 2010. "And maybe a targeted publication or two," Buik added, raising the interest of an old reporter who's always included paper in his career. "We have a publication targeted for NonStop users called The Connection. We're looking to expand that to the OpenVMS contingent."

Connect members and directors like Browder have deep roots in that Digital VMS community, and Buik says the group has a good relationship "with the new [VMS] team in India, and we have monthly calls. We'll be working in tandem with them towards our goals."

IBM iSeries follows in 3000 footsteps?

Once HP announced its exit from 3000 business, IBM turned up its efforts to woo abandoned customers. By some accounts, half of those who are leaving the 3000 have turned to non-HP solutions. It's easier to understand the migrations to Linux or Windows, a pair of industry standard environments. The former is rich with tools to generate custom apps. The latter has a vast array of packaged solutions.

Tougher to figure are the rare migrations to the IBM iSeries. Not because that platform is lacking in any technical prowess, or even that its ecosystem is evaporating quickly. Those customers who've found a refuge from HP's business pullout in the iSeries have to look at a large vendor supporting a niche platform -- then see a different strategy from HP's for sustaining non-industry-standard computing.

The 3000 customers who've moved to iSeries sometimes already used the integrated server elsewhere in their organizations. Others have settled on a packaged solution like Commercialware's e-commerce package, one that led straight to the iSeries. But every one of them might observe the same vendor behavior this year from IBM that HP demonstrated in the four years up to the 3000's exit from HP's futures.

The iSeries community sounds and feels much like the 3000 user group volunteers and partners of the late 1990s. They complain that their platform no longer seems strategic to IBM, hunger for mentions of it during Big Blue's roadmap talks, count up the resources no longer devoted to iSeries heartlands such as the RPG language or the OS400 operating system. IBM's put Unix executives in charge of the iSeries business, according to one long-time iSeries IBM executive.

At the IT Jungle blog, writer Dan Burger interviewed an iSeries skeptic who holds an experienced view of the community. Bob Cancilla, just retired as CTO for IBM's Rational Software subsidiary. (IBM bought Rational in 2003, spending $2 billion for a development environment.) Until this month Cancilla worked for IBM, but now as the CTO of IBM software business partner Oxford International, he's speaking his mind about the future of iSeries as he sees it, using the podium of his blog, i-nsider.

If you look objectively at the IBM organization today and how it has positioned the IBM i Operating System, you will see a critical reality that should be driving you to modern platform-neutral solutions, today!

IBM hasn't commented on last week's blog post from Cancilla, who was CTO for IBM's Rational Business Developer IDE. He's pointed out that while the iSeries (or Series i, or i5, or IBM i) is still technically advanced and integrated, IBM's not selling much of it.

The bottom line is we all need to face the facts of what is happening. IBM i, the OS, is gradually fading away based on IBM not selling it. Since there is no longer an organization to sell IBM i there can be no turn around or return to prominence.

In 2007 IBM merged the business lines of its pSeries (Unix) and iSeries operations, calling the new group the IBM Power Systems Organization. "This new organization is now devoid of IBM i executives," Cancilla laments. The Power series (which also runs RedHat Linux) is comprised of computers that are identical in a way that HP could never offer its HP 3000 and HP 9000 servers built from common PA-RISC chips. IBM didn't wire up a special MFIO board chip, like HP did, so a 3000 box could never boot Unix. Even with this Power flexibility, though, the demise of the OS400 community -- and so the iSeries computer line and its vendors -- seems inevitable to Cancilla.

"It will simply continue to decline in users and will most definitely be dropped by IBM when the revenue reaches a point where it is no longer feasible to continue supporting it," he wrote in a blog entry last week. Cancilla is getting a strong reaction from iSeries advocates, according to the IT Jungle's Dan Burger. But that probably won't change the sales effort at IBM. This is an aspect of a vendor's disaffection with a platform that was never played out in public for the HP 3000. Right up to the announcement of HP's exit, the vendor and its partners never broached the prospect of HP giving up on the 3000.

But the AS400 (or iSeries or System i) saw a 40 percent decline in sales from '07 to '08, according to the IT Jungle. IBM has reduced the profile of the most i-like parts of the system when it moved System Licensed Internal Code and a Technology Independent Machine Interface into a new Virtualization Engine.

HP 3000 homesteaders and those still stung by Hewlett-Packard's misstep of 2001 often point to IBM as a vendor who got it right about non-industry-standard platforms. Cancilla, whose new company offers a legacy modernization solution, believes that the iSeries is going to drift into irrelevance due to IBM sales and the homogenization of its unique technology.

The RPG language is unique technology for the iSeries, and Cancilla asked IBM to port it to the more popular IBM Unix and Power Linux environments. Request denied. HP 3000 customers once hoped that IMAGE would gain a new home on PCs, but that project was left to third parties without support from HP. There's also a corollary in HP's refusal to port HP-UX to any processor except its niche Itanium chips.

Vendors such as HP and IBM have a laser focus on services these days and look to have turned away from devotion to the design and sale of computer environments. HP executives had a glib answer for those who said that IBM wasn't dropping its AS/400-iSeries business in 2002. "They will," said executives like Winston Prather and Christine Martino. POWER 7 generation chips and reorganized businesses notwithstanding, those HP execs may turn out to be correct given enough time. You migrate now, or migrate later, they say.

But HP still has a card to play to maintain enough goodwill that you may replace that 3000 with a ProLiant server, running Windows or Linux, or even something newer like an emulator. The vendor can cooperate with emulator licensing for MPE/iX, a stop-gap until completing a migration -- exacting work in the most complex IT project that most 3000 owners have ever conducted.

As to that iSeries heartland of RPG, HP was one of the few system vendors who ever created a port of the language, which ran on the 3000 for the IBM customer lured to the 3000 in the 1980s. Today a German firm, Richter Software, converts RPG into COBOL because "the new generation of programmers have no knowledge of RPG." Even though COBOL is not considered cutting-edge, it is a de-facto industry standard for business. COBOL continues to drive thousands of HP 3000 apps, until they are migrated, and perhaps even on new platforms.

Migration away from platform-bound languages such as RPG is a step in that detail-laden transition. In 2007 ScreenJet developed T2C, with a bit of initial help from Richter, that transforms the HP 3000's unique Transact language into COBOL code. A subsequent product, Transact Migration Software, was built by ScreenJet and Imacs founder David Dummer, who created Transact. What's more, the COBOL that's created by Transaction Migration Software is compatible with the 3000's COBOL II -- thereby inserting another stepping stone on the path away from the HP 3000. T2C is sold both by ScreenJet and Speedware, a couple of partners with a clear-eyed vision about the long term of the HP 3000.

3000 emulator marches onward

After the project lay dormant for years, work on an HP 3000 emulator is preparing for its first-level alpha testing by October, according to the CEO of Stromasys. The Swiss-based company was named SRI when 3000 emulators were a hot topic among 3000 homesteaders and the OpenMPE group. This fall, the company says, an all-software product to enable Intel PCs to become HP 3000s goes into serious testing.

Stromasys CEO Robert Boers reported that the company that's been selling VAX, Alpha and PDP-11 emulators for more 15 years has gained HP's cooperation with 3000 MPE licensing. An earlier version of the emulator was designed to mimic the MFIO board of the PA-RISC 3000s. HP wanted that work suspended, and so the project was shelved. But a new design bypasses the MFIO work and creates the equivalent of an rp2470 server, a PA-RISC system rated at more horsepower than current 3000 hardware.

Of course that rating is subject to the testing of the emulator, since the product uses Intel hardware to drive what Boers calls a low-end, single-CPU HP 3000 clone. The product won't create new HP 3000s because it complies with HP's MPE/iX licensing for emulators: no new systems, only transfers of existing 3000 licenses.

Stromasys, which operates offices in North America, Asia, Europe and elsewhere, restarted its emulator project after a change of strategy by HP. As the vendor's end of lab operations drew closer, the need to resolve the emulation issues rose up on engineering and licensing to-do lists. Late in 2008 the vendor announced a license plan that would go into effect if an emulator was released before HP's end-of-support date in December, 2010.

Boers said his company, which has been successful in working with HP on Digital computer emulators, plans to begin selling the tested product in 2010. Protection for HPSUSAN numbers and recognition of licenses for third-party tools is covered in the emulator's architecture, he said. The hardware license key is coded in (although who's managing that is unclear), and a separate space that third parties can use for license keys is also part of the software.

It's early in the coming-out party for this product, so far back on the curve that Boers said the company hasn't examined possible pricing or approached software suppliers. Strobe Data has also had a emulation project underway over the same time period, roughly from 2002 onward. But the issue of whether the 3000 market is big enough to support two emulator vendors doesn't seem to concern Boers.

"At the moment we don't know that much about the 3000's market," he said. "This is a nice thing to do. I know the market isn't very big." What works in Stromasys favor to set expectations low at first: the 3000 emulator shares 70 percent of the code with the CHARON virtualization products the company sells to VAX and Alpha users of OpenVMS. HP technical manager Ling Chang said of the CHARON product, "our VAX and Alpha customers are now able to successfully move their existing applications to the HP’s latest server technologies."

Perhaps there's been a realization inside HP that emulation for HP 3000s could keep more users from migrating to non-HP solutions. A thicker abstraction layer -- deep enough, Boers said, to run the TurboIMAGE database -- would offer a 64-bit implemention of PA-RISC on Intel's Xeon family of hardware. ProLiants running Xeon chips could drive HP 3000 programs, if third-party licensing participation appears and testing succeeds. HP's subsystems such as COBOL would be licensed. Plus there's cross-platform products such as the Eloquence database, which might run in a Linux or Windows blade partition to supply data.

As for who might use a 3000 emulator, obvious candidates would be homesteading customers who need access to the latest peripherals, as well as companies who want a clear path to performance boosts as Intel releases faster processors. There's also the customers who see the abstraction of PA-RISC and the 3000 as a smoother way to revive and retain key MPE/iX applications.

Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies, who's been consulting on open source tools as well as migrations in the 3000 community, said an emulator which could mimic an HP 3000 might be just the solution for a customer of his who's been working on a lengthy migration to SAP. Several key Point of Sale modules can't be duplicated in SAP, and a lift and shift migration could be costly and make the finished solution complex.

"Business is tight now, and projects are slowing," Edminster said. "Without having an emulator, the closest I could come would be to use Speedware's [AMXW] product to do the job," he said. "But given a choice, I'd prefer a hardware emulator if it will work properly."

TV news streams from the Tech Forum

The Connect conference that drew 2,700 attendees is long over, but some of the user group and HP messages from the HP Technology Forum & Expo live on, streamed from the Web. SDR News, a video interview service, gathered more than a dozen one-to-one interviews at the event. SDR was "invited media," according to Connect president Nina Buik.

The coverage includes a talk about the future of the Connect user group from its incoming president, Chris Koppe of Speedware. In 11 minutes of Q&A, Koppe talks about the efforts to raise the user group's visibility inside HP. There are also fundamentals about what Connect's mission is during a year when all user groups are working to remain relevant and vital resources.

The SDR coverage is interesting because it was recorded and streamed live at the conference -- so it's not as dressed up and controlled as the HP-created videos all over the Web. Koppe was one of only three people interviewed by SDR at the HPTF who were not HP employees. (There's also five minutes with the winner of a $10,000 drawing, but that probably qualifies as "human interest" instead of news.) Koppe takes his office in January for the user group and has been a board member or volunteer since 2005. He has brought the tribal knowledge of the HP 3000 user community to the group from his work on the Interex board of directors.

The 20 SDR videos also include a word from a company that began an HP 3000 emulator project, although that platform and the ongoing project aren't mentioned.

Koppe, who was a member of the Interex board when that user group folded four summers ago, talks a bit about the Connect business model. "We're non-profit and we run on a shoestring budget," he said. "Every dollar of what we collect goes to member services."

He also noted that vendors will get airtime to add to Connect's voice to HP user community. A Special Interest Group for vendors is in Connect's plans. The user group has great motivation for giving vendors a voice like the one Interex offered for two decades via SIG-Softvend. Speaking from a conference floor filled with vendor booths, Koppe said the Connect vendors "also end up being a funding source for our organization."

Other SDR interviews and video from the conference include keynotes from Intel and Brocade, a Microsoft roadmap talk, and a fascinating interview with Robert Boers, CEO of Stromasys. That company was once named SRI and started work on an HP 3000 emulator in 2004. We'll have more tomorrow about that subject, an issue that once dominated the advocacy of OpenMPE.

Fiorina flips hat toward Senate rack

Align these three compass plot points, if you can, all announced within one week:

1. HP announces its toughest quarter in five years
2. Former CEO Carly Fiorina announces an exploration of a run for US Senate
3. Sentencing is delayed on the '06 HP phone spying case

The HP 3000 can provide a path across all three. Migrations are afoot or finished by 3000 owners because of Fiorina's business strategy. Not any specific swipe she took to cleave the 3000 from HP, but the natural evolution of shedding legacy business. Growth across all HP businesses was the 2001 mantra, increases that the 3000 community would not provide for the HP bottom line. "If it's not growing, it's going" was the mandate handed to intermediate managers.

Growth at HP in 2001 led to pruning the enterprise computer line by one notable system. Eight years later, enterprise servers and storage run a weak fourth to Services, PCs, and Imaging/Printer businesses. Three of the four legs of HP's chair are wobbling this year. It's the first genuine challenge CEO Mark Hurd has faced since he was brought in to replace the fired Fiorina. Enterprise solutions that are rich in profitability offered a profound sticky loyalty like the 3000, but they won't lift enterprise fortunes now. HP's moving away from hardware and proprietary environments in favor of services through The Cloud.

Fiorina told 3000 customers at a summertime HP World conference that HP “had never stranded a customer on legacy technology,” the only reference that even came close to a mention of the HP 3000 customers’ transition. Seven years later, HP World is gone forever, but Fiorina is mounting a comeback despite her legacy.

Despite what some community members believe, Carly Fiorina didn't arrive in the HP boardroom to take marching orders. She was hired to be a star CEO whose highest glam moment was sharing the stage with Gwen Stefani. Facing down the HP board's expectations, and marshaling support across a company rich in HP Way heritage -- these were not her strengths. A seat in the US Senate will require campaigning to win the votes of the little people, as well as casting off old millionaire's habits.

Being rich in 2009 -- HP gave her $21 million cash to leave in '05 -- can distance a candidate from people suffering through layoffs and pay cuts. That's one tough quarter that HP just reported, if you think of the company like 3000 users used to: a systems supplier. If not for the ink and services profits, HP might be looking tanked in the middle of this recession. Legacy systems supply long-term support profits, but the vendor is out of that business. No love for 3000s, little for OpenVMS -- it all adds up to making a business relationship out of serving instead of supplying.

Fiorina had to win boardroom fights to edge HP out of the last vestiges of its HP Way. People forget that she championed a merger with a massive PC maker that eked past a shareholder donnybrook. The next plan was to buy Price WaterhouseCooper, a step into the services business. The HP board didn't want to pay that much for a services entry. That same boardroom asked few questions about eliminating a 27-year-old business server line.

Within a year after the PWC failure, storm clouds were mounting around Fiorina. PCs hadn't delivered profitability, even while HP was selling more ProLiants than RISC servers. When the board fired her over an inability to take direction, the messy details were reported out of the boardroom and into the business press. This kind of insight on HP strategy would have been useful to 3000 owners in the year after Y2K. In trying to determine what HP might do about its declining server business today, insights to the past might help.

HP vowed to unmask the source of leaks from its boardroom after exchanges appeared in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, the kind of communications control craved by corporations of a certain size. HP ran roughshod over privacy rules in a phone scam afterward, paid $14 million in penalties, and gave new CEO Mark Hurd something to campaign on in his first year: The Return of HP Integrity.

No, he wasn't referring to the HP servers of the same name, but instead being able to believe HP could respect privacy. The final defendant in that spying case just had his sentencing delayed again this week, more than two years after Mark Wagner testified against HP.

Weak strategy from HP's CEO, focusing on commodity hardware and services, leads to a boardroom fight that gets Fiorina fired. The HP 3000 never has a chance in that kind of future. Illegal phone spying gives HP a black eye that still isn't fully healed two years later. And while the services business that Fiorina couldn't sell to the board now keeps HP sales afloat, the former CEO wants to represent California in the US Senate. Nothing ever seems impossible to the only HP chief who was ever forced to resign, until her designs hit the wall. While HP 3000 customers explore options to migrate in an era with frozen budgets, Fiorina will be looking for funding to capture her next job. Like HP customers, she'll need support that doesn't hold her legacy against her.

HP Q3 shows G6 rise, Integrity fall

HP released its third quarter '09 results this afternoon, numbers that showed ProLiant G6 server revenues on the rise while Integrity-based system sales dropped for the third straight quarter. The Intel Xeon-based G6 units like the blade at left operate with Windows and Linux environments, while the HP-UX alternative to the HP 3000 can call upon only Integrity servers.

The quarterly report shows HP managed to beat earnings estimates for the period. However, it took soaring revenues and profits out of the EDS operations to offset steep drops in most other HP sectors, including the Business Critical Servers group that sells Integrity and HP-UX. BCS revenue declined 30 percent from Q3 of 2008, results from a much stronger fiscal year. But not even blade revenues could lift BCS. Blade sales were down 14 percent from last year's quarter. Integrity sales were off by 34 percent versus last year's Q3.

HP CFO Cathie Lesjak said that the G6 ProLiants, just rolled out in April, have performed well in the server sector. These Industry Standard Servers which run Windows and Linux were the only bright spot on a tough enterprise storage and server picture.

"While each of the businesses within ESS was down compared with the prior year sequentially, ISS grew 14 percent as a result of strong customer demand for our newly launched G6 platform," Lesjak said.

In contrast, BCS sales slipped to $578 million for the period, compared to $2.2 billion of the Intel Xeon server revenues. While HP is now selling $4 of ProLiants for every dollar of Integrity, the profitability from the more advanced Integrity revenues is what's keeping Integrity in HP's futures. But the next month or so could tell the tale of how HP enterprise server business will fare in 2010, according to HP CEO Mark Hurd's prior report.

In Q2 of '09, Hurd told analysts that the August-September 2009 timeframe is where HP hopes enterprise computing customers come around and reverse the '09 trends. Hurd explained this enterprise sales stall as companies' mandates to slow down new projects.

I think the more important question is what are those planning sessions looking like in August and September of 2009 about 2010. I think CIOs have been giving marching orders that say "Take that  infrastructure; keep the infrastructure running. If you have to replace things to keep things running, replace it. New projects -- be very particular about new projects you start. And if you can avoid starting that project, avoid starting it." We have customers that tell me, "We're just delaying as long as we can until we have to buy."

Hurd and HP are hoping that an uptick in the economy during this current quarter will pull some FY2010 sales into HP's Q4. Hurd said in a statement that "Business is stabilizing, and we are confident that HP will be an early beneficiary of an economic turnaround and will continue to outperform when conditions improve." Hurd predicted that 2010 will be a better year than 2009, but he doesn't see evidence yet of a turnaround. "We're encouraged I think by the stability that we're beginning to see in the market, but not yet at a point that we're ready to call it a turn," he said.

With the economy not yet rebounding, HP might be cautious about removing any business segment that's been sliding as consistently as the Business Critical Servers. But the HP 3000 was eliminated from HP's plans in 2001 because of its declining growth, albeit in a much different time in Hewlett-Packard history.

While HP's hardware businesses struggled -- even printer sales were down -- services including the EDS unit have become the new engine of the Hewlett-Packard economy. Lesjak summarized the services windfall.

"Drilling into the services business," she said in an analyst conference call, "Q3 revenue was $3.9 billion in IT outsourcing, $2.4 billion in technology services, $1.4 billion in application services, and $711 million in Business Process Outsourcing." Services made up 31 percent of quarterly sales, the largest segment.

But even some service operations are being scrutinized. In the hours before the Q3 call, rumors were afoot that had HP considering a sale of its BPO business. Reuters reported that unidentified sources say BPO, "which provides back-office support to clients, [is] a low-margin business that is not central to [HP] growth plans." Much of BPO is operated out of India.

Overall, the HP Q3 numbers showed only a 2 percent revenue drop over last year's Q3, a report that demonstrates just how much lift the EDS business has provided in a year with steep server declines. PCs also experienced a sales fall-off. The company posted $1.6 billion in total Q3 earnings, $1.3 billion of which came out of its Services group. HP paid $13 billion for EDS last fall, and it reported that 16,000 layoffs out of the 24,600 forecast have already taken place. HP said these "removals" improved its cost structure, one contributor to the HP earnings.

OpenMPE assists HP with end of life process

At this summer's HP Technology Forum & Expo, only two meetings covered the life cycle of the HP 3000. Hewlett-Packard showed up in a room with three customers to confirm its migration campaign was unchanged. Meanwhile, the other side of the 3000's lifespan was discussed at an OpenMPE meeting in the conference in Las Vegas.

While HP continues to call its 2010 support exit "the HP e3000 end of life," OpenMPE's homesteading advocacy sees a very different future for the system in 2011. OpenMPE chair Birket Foster said that some customers are still hoping for an HP reversal of its "quit the 3000 business" edit of 2001.

"We're in a funny phase where people are still hoping for a miracle that HP would do something different" than exit the market, he said. "And HP's not going to." Since neither the migration or homestead camps came to Las Vegas with new wagers, what would constitute news from the show? Foster said the Connect user group directors attended the OpenMPE meeting to learn how HP was treating an "end-of-life" mission with HP customers. Foster said there are lessons to be learned for customers who might move from other HP-proprietary environments.

Part of the reason the user group directors attended the meeting, Foster says, "is because they recognize that we're pioneering a process. This process assists HP so it can define a framework for managing the end of life of an operating system/product line."

OpenMPE has given HP suggestions about preservation of 3000 documentation and other resources the community is accustomed to using. The directors came to learn about how to do such things, in part because the OpenVMS community is vigilant about any HP retreat from OpenVMS development. The OpenVMS environment runs on Itanium blade servers, for example.

Foster said that Connect director Alan Dick (at left), Director of Advocacy and SIGs, "got it" when the discussions examined HP's response to an end of life strategy. "He wants to be sure they do advocacy to HP on behalf of OpenMPE, to remind HP there's an issue if the vendor doesn't manage it properly. Done properly at the next end of life, "HP might just keep people in the fold."

Can Google Go Where 3000s Went?

This week Google unveiled a campaign to bring small businesses under its cloud service. The effort is called Going Google, a subscription to a range of office applications run through the Google network and servers. Google wants $1,335 to set up 10 users with a package of apps which enable collaboration, video and hosting, as well as messaging. Yearly administration is another $3,300

Analysts say this push will crowd Microsoft, whose Office and Exchange apps now rule on workstations around the world. But the effort also recalls the HP 3000 enterprises of the 1980s: a full range of software such as HP Deskmanager for mail, HP Word, graphics and more, all driven by HP 3000 centralized servers. In time HP tried to push New Wave to bring PCs into the host application loop, a plan with feet of clay from its very first day. Where Going Google differs is in the administration. 3000 users had a local DP manager to call when problems cropped up. The solutions didn't always come immediately from their computer department. But the responsibility rested inside the organization.

In contrast, a Google customer will have to endure service outages as if they were an Act of God. No matter how big the service group, everyone can get hacked. This morning Twitter went offline completely for about two hours, victimized by a Distributed Denial of Service attack. The IT group at Twitter's HQ has had a very long day already, one that's not over since Twitter services are still spotty as of this afternoon.

This is the reality of the 2009 cloud: A broad reach that HP could only fantasize about in the 1980s, even while 50,000 of its employees connected via an HP Desk network. Jump forward a couple of decades and collaborate with anyone without building network infrastructure. Just remember to tell your management that working in the clouds means you risk running afoul of Internet demons.

No IT solution is without risk. Both homesteading and migrating customers hear about risks of making a transition -- either a move to dependence on new non-HP partners, or pushing IT apps to a new environment. You can prepare yourself for your own disaster recovery, or defense from DDoS. Or you can rely on Service Level Agreements that will be tested when problems arise.

A one-stop solution still isn't a part of Going Google. You won't find a Bill of Materials app in the lineup, just like MANMAN wasn't part of a HP-supplied Desk suite. In a best case MANMAN could be programmed to accept Deskmanager mail, using APIs for MANMAN, or FORTRAN inside MANMAN's code. The same kind of integration must be available from cloud apps like Google Docs, or whatever HP puts inside its cloud computing solution.

Maybe popular apps like Oracle's finance suite or SAP will find a place in the cloud. Or in a more probable solution, your in-house apps run someplace else, where an IT staff defends against DDoS and other surprises. But the more you have to customize your computing -- a good practice to enhance its value -- the more your staff remains tethered to the cloud.

A very small percentage of 3000 sites went all-HP with software, in part because customization was harder in 1989 than it is in 2009. Open source, full-disclosure APIs, source forges and public class libraries are all improvements over those old 3000 choices. IT experience and insight have not become antique skills, though. It's easy to see that a choice of an enterprise-replacement cloud solution will still require programmer savvy, as well as system analyst experience to communicate a company's business rules and requirements. You can outsource for most of that savvy and experience with any number of 3000-facile third parties.

Databases rise from ashes as open source

Imagine a chilly hotel meeting room 15 years ago, across the river from New York City. Databases of the day are having a showdown in there, where the communication technology is type from flimsy plastic slides, foils projected on a wall. Oracle has sent a representative, along with Sybase and Ingres -- the Big Three of databases, although a complete count would include IBM's DB2, to comprise a Big Four. But IBM isn't at this showdown. The HP 3000's IMAGE is, however, touted by Adager's Alfredo Rego.

HP didn't feel the need to attend this meeting of the Greater New York HP Users Group and represent IMAGE. Rego asks a question of all assembled: What happens if a plug is kicked out of a Big DB database server? Will the database survive? They scratch their heads and offer no answer. Built-in recovery is as much a mystery outside the 3000 world in 1994 as the price for 100 seats of Oracle. I was there in that room and heard no answers.

The amount of swagger from the Big Three in the room and in the market was palpable, thick as the icy fog outside on that day. No one could see a future where a database might be offered without a license fee and be suited for enterprise computing. IMAGE sat closest to such a proposal back then, because HP includes the database with every 3000 it sells.

Shoot the clock forward to this hot summer and a database free of fees is common as a dog at a junkyard. Earlier this week we talked of Postgres as a potential open source solution, now bolstered by add-on engineering to become commercial open source. But there's a handful of other candidates for data management that don't require any relationship with a Big Vendor. Among the now-free alternatives are Firebird (tip of the hat to Bruce Hobbs), and one of those Big DBs, Ingres. Both these open source databases collected license fees 15 years ago. Firebird was created out of the ashes of Interbase.

In the economy of today, a database never goes away, whether it's IMAGE being supported by a 3000 homestead community or a Big DB solution that now steps with a lot less swagger. Open source offers a second life for databases with closing markets.

Oracle's fate in those 15 years is best known, unbridled growth that let the company swell enough to buy up open source competitor MySQL. The purchase was part of the Sun acquisition that Oracle wrangled this spring, a clever move to add a free entry to the Oracle lineup. MySQL, Firebird, Ingres and Postgres all line up on the open source side of the database menu today. Standing in a center column is Sybase, still holding on to the dream of an independent database solution -- one not controlled by any vendor of servers or operating systems. Another notable independent entry for HP 3000 customers: Eloquence, created by Marxmeier Software.

Sybase has been around long enough to spin off its own competition. Today the most popular databases in the non-3000 world are Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server. But when that showdown took place in that chilly hotel, Sybase had just licensed its technology to Microsoft, which rebranded the product as SQL Server. Oops. Sybase still sells enough to host a TechWave training conference, and its technology licenses run beyond SQL Server. For example, Sybase now owns PowerBuilder, the application development system for Windows clients. Among the 3000 community's experts, Pivital Solutions can consult in PowerBuilder development. PowerBuilder was popular among HP 3000 manufacturing customers.

HP 3000 ties wrap around Sybase in other ways. Within the Sybase community, database management vendor Bradmark Technologies sells tools such as Surveillance for Sybase IQ 15. While Bradmark made its bones selling TurboIMAGE management solutions, management of many databases is the company's current mission. Surveillance identifies and eliminates problems with Sybase databases.

And Ingres? The database that lost its place to Informix was purchased a few months after that icy meeting by ASK, which created the venerable MANMAN ERP software still running in the 3000 community. After a decade of stumbles running up against SQL Server, DB2 and Oracle, Ingres entered its open source life in 2004. Now the commerce for the new Ingres Corporation flows from support and services for the database and its OpenRoad development tool.

Support and consulting, after all, are the most durable of solutions in computing: the know-how companies need to continue to rely on what they purchased long ago. So long as a company such as British Rail deploys the rebirth of Interbase as Firebird, or IBM purchases Informix to offer it alongside DB2, or Sybase spins itself out to Microsoft and somehow survives, there's no reason to believe any enterprise-grade database will ever see its life end. There's always the fall-back to a new solution for an old problem of "we're out of money." Ingres tells customers that "Ingres is driving the New Economics of IT, where open source technology is delivering better, new ways of doing business in tough economic times." Free software is an attractive starting point whose value gets calculated, in the end, by the cost of hiring the know-how to use it.

Vendors supply database aids for migration

Migrating HP 3000 shops often look for a new database as part of their projects. A customer who's chosen an application over any other consideration, or a reseller as the key element, cares much less about a database. But in-house applications get moved to new databases. Which one to choose sometimes depends on experience and support, from out of house.

Marxmeier Software is the leading choice for companies who want a database that adapts to IMAGE designs. The company's Eloquence has been praised for years. "Eloquence is one of the best products on the market," said 3000 and Unix consultant Craig Lalley of EchoTech. On this spring's release of Version 8.0, Lalley said "So far, I am very impressed, as usual."

But some companies migrating from 3000s want an open source solution for a replacement. Sometimes these companies seek a vendor-neutral strategy. Duane Percox, one of the founders of K-12 app vendor QSS, said his company sought out open source to replace 3000 apps because HP has made the last decision that will impact QSS like HP did when it dropped the 3000.

PostgreSQL, called Postgres by much of the developer community, has gotten high marks as an IMAGE alternative at QSS. But even though Postgres is open source, vendors have emerged to give the database commercial-grade support and consulting. Like RedHat is to Linux, Enterprise DB is to Postgres. Starting with open source code for the database, EnterpriseDB is pushing Postgres into commercial-class caliber.

3000 customers want a company like Marxmeier or EnterpriseDB to be partners when moving in-house applications. Marxmeier even does strong business with third party app suppliers who've moved products to Unix and Windows. Summit Information Technologies credit union app suite is one great example.

EnterpriseDB touts a product it calls Postgres Plus Advanced Server, the company’s flagship relational database product based on PostgreSQL. EnterpriseDB includes new technology in the Server that enables companies to move more Oracle applications more easily. While that's not much help to the migrating HP 3000 customer, the company promises that a new “Infinite Cache provides massive scalability at low cost by leveraging commodity hardware and eliminating custom programming."

Commodity hardware is at the heart of many a 3000 migration, as customers turn to racks of Windows servers and leverage the in-house expertise in the Microsoft environment. Perhaps of most value to 3000 customers looking at migration today is EnterpriseDB's comparison of Postgres and MySQL, the other open source database. In a deft move, Oracle acquired ownership of MySQL this spring when it purchased Sun Microsystems. Deciding which open source DB to evaluate gets simpler with such Web resources.

There's a Web-based seminar at the EnterpriseDB site comparing the two open source databases. Bill Pillow of the company said they often come in contact with MySQL customers "when they've hit the wall with MySQL." He called MySQL record-bound and better as a read-only choice for a database. Commercial companies are building enterprise-grade foundations from open source by now. But the essential element remains a vendor who's responsible for software in business-critical environments. Finding support and consultation is a hidden but critical cost in using open source solutions.

Postgres still has a long way to travel to become an integrated partner with 3000 tools such as those from Robelle, Speedware, Minisoft and many more. Eloquence counts all those alliances, but open source still appeals on its technical merits and cost of acquisition. Still, third party databases have been more popular with 3000 migrators in the QSS customer base. "We have done a bunch of PostgreSQL," Percox said, "and find it to be a wonderful database, but our customers are choosing SQL Server at a rate of about 80/20 over PostgreSQL." Vendor support continues to matter.

Four years on, dust of Interex demise suggests virtual meetings

Four years ago this week, the Interex HP user group slammed its doors shut in a stunning implosion. The organization that grew out of the HP3000 Users Group in the 3000's earliest days declared bankruptcy after 31 years. The anniversary of the demise is a reminder that no amount of legacy or laurels can permit any institution to rest comfortably.

When Interex went down it didn't close up like HP 3000 customer Circuit City, lingering and selling off assets in months of public auction. Instead, in mid-July of '05 it was as if someone kicked out the user group's power cord. A Web site went dark overnight, millions in conference sponsor deposits vanished, and thousands of members learned their conference fees were worthless.

This teardown of a portion of the 3000 community is more than a history lesson, however. Four years ago one suggestion for a virtual conference got a few days of consideration, and it's worth reviewing in the light of 2009's better networking bandwidth and tighter travel budgets.

HP teased out a first few steps for a virtual conference a few months ago. It put up a series of talks on the G6 models of the ProLiant systems, using a fresh interface and offering a way to collect information from fellow attendees. Perhaps the vendor will see more need to push its investments into video and networked data.

The venerable Wirt Atmar stepped up in 2005 with a concept for a virtual conference, one that could replace the annual meeting which kept Interex afloat for decades. Atmar's $249 QCShow software (free 30-day trial available) from his AICS Research company could bring speakers who have PowerPoint or PDF slides to any user's desktop, complete with audio. It's an idea that might appeal to 3000 customers who don't need to research a migration platform at a conference and need training for homesteading systems. Atmar said:

Given the technology we have at hand, it would be entirely possible with QCShow to create a virtual Interex meeting -- but even better, at a substantially reduced cost as compared to Interex’s traditional fees. AICS Research would manage and host the process.

The way that I envision the process is that for the “meeting,” 30 talks would be selected. The talks would range in length from 30 to 45 minutes, at the speaker’s discretion (there is no one standing by with a hook to pull you off-stage in this medium).

The process of selecting the 30 talks from those submitted would be highly selective, but that selection process wouldn’t be done by us. Rather, after a submission deadline has passed, all of the submitted talks would be posted on a web page so that everyone could vote on their top ten choices. After all the votes were tallied, the top 30 vote-getters would be announced.

The speakers would then narrate their talks at their respective locations. We’ll provide the recording software and substantial hints on how to create a quality recording. Once the recordings were done, the speakers would send us their PowerPoint or Adobe PDF slides and their WAV files on a CD (the raw files will generally be in the 100-150 MB range). We would then synchronize their audio tracks to their slides and prepare their presentation for low-bandwidth delivery over the Internet, at no charge to the speakers.

Speakers would also receive a complimentary pass to freely access all of the talks presented in this year’s conference. Non-speakers (ordinary registrants) would be charged $250.

In order for us to break even, at least 50 people would have to register for the conference. If that “attendance level” could not be achieved, we wouldn’t go forward with the process. But if it could, it would seem like an excellent way, given the technology that now exists, to continue the original idea of the HP 3000 user group from 30 years ago, where the motto was, “Users helping users,” while allowing a much broader reach than ever before.

A few customers at the time said they'd participate, some even after they'd invested in Interex attendance. Gilles Schipper of the support company GSA said "Too bad for me that this option wasn't available before I shelled out $1,700 to Interex." The next generation of a user group conference, in Atmar's view, would have some downsides to go along with more affordable costs. Representation would be direct rather than elected, but give customers more control over content.

In the model I imagine, we would change from a representative democracy, with elected board members, to a direct democracy, where everyone has a direct vote and there would be no necessity for an elected set of board members.

The upsides to the model that I imagine are these:

     o Everyone would have a say in selecting the content of the meeting.

     o The cost of the meeting would be enormously reduced.

     o Travel expenses would disappear, nor would you even have to be there on a particular day. The meetings would be permanently recorded, so you could view them at your leisure.

     o You would be able to attend every “session.” Conflicts would be eliminated.

The downsides to this format are:

     o Interactions with the speakers would be greatly to somewhat diminished.

     o The capacity to ask HP managers the hard-hitting questions characteristic of past management roundtables, and the capacity to get immediate, definitive, straight-shooting answers, would be reduced.

     o HP would lose its capacity to control the content of the meeting or suggest who the speakers might be.

Atmar passed away early this year, but AICS Research marches on with products and services as always. What has also died is the concept of a confrontational meeting of users and vendor reps. Whatever friction that sparked creative heat has been smoothed off by HP's goals for a meeting. Management roundtables don't air grievances or identify opportunity to improve product. Since that's already missing from a 2009 conference -- and reducing HP's control of content looks like an upside -- the virtual meeting would seem to only restrict interaction with speakers.

And there are plenty of new technologies, four years later, to let attendees interact online with speakers. One 3000 software developer, Tom Brandt, joked in 2005 that in a virtual meeting HP would also "lose the ability to toss accredited journalists out of sessions, depriving attendees of yet another reason to bash the vendor."

As a journalist who's been challenged at a couple of user conference doorways in 2002, and again last year, I wouldn't miss that part of the user conference experience.