Dell looks to acquire Quest's sharing tech

The HP 3000 community might be getting its first multi-billion dollar acquisition in its history. Quest Software, which makes one element of the BridgeWare migration solution along with Taurus Software, is reported to be a Dell Computer buyout target.

A report from the business website Bloomberg said the software company is in talks to become a property of Dell. One analyst firm says the stock could be worth as much as $28 a share, which would put the value of the acquisition at $2.4 billion. Quest has branched into many other markets, including Oracle's database. But the deepest roots of this company are the Shareplex software that has been used to cluster MPE systems since the early 1990s.

Quest's director of sales John Saylor continues to point out the company still sells solutions for the 3000 market. Not nearly as many firms can point to sales of software for the 3000 customer as did in the '90s, or even 10 years ago.  Maybe most important to HP, Quest has been a driver in getting Sun's customer base onto the rolls of Hewlett-Packard. BridgeWare is the latest part of that package, Saylor says.

"Not only is Quest’s BridgeWare is a leader in HP 3000 MPE migrations through its partnership with Taurus, but the company is also the market leader in platform migrations from Sun-Oracle platforms to IBM, HP and Dell-Oracle platforms." Databases have been the heart of Quest's enterprise for two decades by now. Most recently, the SystemBridger Bundle was bringing pre-configured PC hardware to 3000 sites looking for a reach into other databases, migrating or not. 

Oracle is a key component of what Quest connects with for commodity platforms. There's also This is how it became a public company worth billions. But the Bridgeware solution in the Bundle aims to bring non-IMAGE databases in step with the MPE data stronghold. Quest calls the software technology "to save time and money across physical, virtual and cloud environments." Taurus President Cailean Sherman said the joint venture in Bridgeware adds analysis capability.

"Over the years we've been working with a lot of companies who are either homesteading, or taking their time migrating off the 3000," Sherman said. "But they also want to take advantage of all the open systems tools to perform ad hoc analysis."

This type of analysis wasn't feasible for some homesteaders, because the access took its toll on the production performance of IMAGE and KSAM databases, she explained. A combination of recent projects, BridgeWare enhancements and discounting led to the partnership with Abtech. The result is a data store, including the relational database license and hardware fully implemented, priced between $10,000 and $75,000.

Dell, for those who haven't looked recently, has been reshaping itself as a provider of enterprise IT, having virtually ceded the consumer market to HP. Dell has been making acquisitions -- five already in 2012 --  to add software, computer storage and networking gear to its lineup of PCs.

 

 

 

Programming Note: Holiday at Hand

Like much of the Interweb news community, we're taking Monday off to celebrate Memorial Day here in the US. As a nephew of a veteran killed in combat in WW II, it's a significant day to me. Uncle Nick was special in the family's lore, cut down in his early 20s as part of the Battle of the Bulge.

Memorial Day, of course, began as a commemorative holiday for Civil War veterans here in the US. When I was growing up the holiday was just as often called Decoration Day, for the custom of decorating the graves of the fallen veterans. There's a national moment of silence being observed today at 4PM EDT. Have a safe and enjoyable holiday while your HP 3000 keeps the flag flying.

One of our sponsors, Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies, noted a connection between memorials and the simple act of making a trail for others to follow. He spotted the parallel after reading an entry at Seth Godin's blog of Saturday, What Are You Leaving Behind?

"This entry reminded me of our US holiday," Edminster wrote. "And those of us who are working to preserve -- and when possible, advance -- our beloved HP 3000, with its most wondrous brain and nervous system: MPE/iX. 

"I couldn't help but think of [Godin's] post when I saw this, and wished more of us either took the time to pass along the history, knowledge, lore even -- of this venerable system, for those of us that follow."

We'll see you with a new report on Tuesday.

Why HP Financials Should Remain Relevant

File this article under News You Can Use. I'm about to make a case for why the quarterly reports of Hewlett-Packard -- a company posting more than $125 billion in annual sales -- should still matter to you. If your job is to plan IT resource deployment, like who's learning what skill or where investments go in 2013 and beyond, HP's reports remain relevant.

We've been dividing ourselves into two camps since late 2001: those leaving the 3000 and those remaining. For the ones who are leaving, or have a migration right behind them in the rear-view, HP's profile in 2012 is even more important than it was a decade ago. Hewlett-Packard is probably driving your technology and services choices. The success of adopting its products in Unix, Linux, servers or even the cloud gets reflected in HP sales numbers. And HP still announces strategies when it talks to securities analysts.

As an example, the CEO Meg Whitman told employees in a letter yesterday, prior to the quarterly results release, that this round of 27,000 layoffs is going to be different from layoffs of 2005. "Another difference from years past is what we plan to do with the savings," she said in her letter. "The majority of savings [via employee cutbacks] this time around will be invested in the business. We'll be investing to drive leadership in the three strategic pillars – cloud, security and information optimization."

HP drove its previous layoff savings right out to the shareholders, not the customers. As a continuing customer of HP products, these words of investing are finally those that you want to hear. Cloud has little to do with HP's consumer business. Same for security and information optimization. This is an enterprise play on a field where HP is way behind, by Whitman's own scoring.

Even though HP stock hit a 52-week low before her comments, today it's having a relatively good day. The investors just got told they won't see direct profit increases because of HP's changes, and its okay with them. Like you, the majority of them have got a long-term relationship with Hewlett-Packard. Of course if that's not true for you, then getting your homesteading choice reinforced makes the quarterly results relevant, too.

The 3.5 percent rebound the stock's enjoying today is about finance, not company futures. "HP beats estimates on earnings," the headlines go, playing the forecasting card about expected profits -- instead of the downward trend since last year.

Whitman knows, like you do, that "Our business is still declining," in part because customers like homesteaders are not with HP anymore. And the migration segment of the 3000 populace has left HP-centric alternatives behind, in the majority. Whitman said HP still needs to "invest to drive R&D and innovation in our core businesses of servers, storage and networking." It's work that's undone, and now the company will be taking what's special about its Unix and delivering it to the Linux market, pretty much without reward.

The Gartner Group looked over the exit-Itanium Odyssey Project and found that it's going to level the sales playing field for Linux at HP. That's what happened to the HP 3000 at Hewlett-Packard back in the early 1990s. Eventually the product that had less in common with HP's innovation (read: MPEand IMAGE) and had to march uphill. The trend from the top managers in HP servers remains the same as it was: follow the sales. Gartner thinks Odyssey is good for HP -- to the extent it can stop the steep decline of the HP Unix business. But it's inevitable.

As these enhancements roll out, Gartner believes HP will be more inclined to market and sell Linux on an even playing field to Unix, which will add more market momentum to Linux and greater decline of Unix. As this decline occurs, HP will be able to delay migrations or reinforce HP-UX user loyalty by diverting its generally loyal base to a strong mission-critical alternative and viable replacement for Itanium. By accelerating the pace of x86 adoption for mission-critical workloads, HP will drive down the margins that it has traditionally enjoyed as a vendor of large-scale, non-x86 Unix servers. Although BCS only represents 10% of HP's server, storage and networking revenue, the margins are at a much higher proportion.

Those italics are ours, not Gartner's. With that language, any companies no longer doing business with HP can hear an echo of their chaos and trauma over the last 10 years. Although the HP 3000 represented a small part of the company's server revenue, its margins were at a much higher proportion. Now this kind of profitable business is ebbing away even more. HP's not going to chase PC business like it once did. (It's got a project in place now to examine the value of the Compaq brand it acquired in 2001.) But it's more than one annual buying cycle away from generating hope of innovation, much less a fresh value for companies who want integration -- or as HP likes to call it now, convergence.

You might have left HP behind years ago, but need to defend that decision as a homesteader. Or your choice going forward is the success of HP's strategy. Either position needs current information, the kind that can be tracked over time and pinned to a point of profits, sales and plans.

Rising Sun, setting Unix: HP's next migration unfolds in secret slides, emails

Ever wonder what the demise of the 3000 inside HP looked like? The event that reshaped all of our careers surfaced suddenly for some. For other community members, the vendor's departure was inevitable, given the indicators they followed. The week the US courts lifted the inevitable veil off HP-UX. Hewlett-Packard used its business acumen to decide the lifespan of its 3000 business. Now we can see what that kind of review looked like, thanks to Oracle and a fired HP CEO.

There is little explanation for how Oracle knew which secret emails and slides to uncover but one -- Mark Hurd and his leave-behinds at HP had these maps in hand. They knew exactly what to request in the discovery phase. It's unprecendented, to my eye. I saw an HP purchase order for $22 million per quarter paid to one vendor. If you wonder what something like an $88 million annual PO looks like, click on the graphic above. HP was spending like this for years, all to ensure that Intel would keep developing and creating Itanium processors. It wasn't spending anything to migrate HP-UX to a non-Itanium, commodity chip. Before long, these Unix customers -- plus ones using VMS, NonStop and more -- will do that migration instead. Linux on Intel. I can't even guess what NonStop or VMS will do.

These are the heart of HP's remaining proprietary computing environments. NonStop, OpenVMS and HP-UX use Itanium as crucially as a liver in a human body. Pull out Itanium from HP's futures and you have no more reason for any customer to leave their apps on these operating systems. Because the OSs don't run anywhere else. HP knew this and talked about it, both in its internal meetings as well as high tension negotiations with Intel. It's just that HP was saying something very different to the public. So was Intel. Anybody who believes Intel has other ideas about Itanium futures needs to read a few of the released emails.

If you don't have time for that, just scan the PowerPoint slides. There's a stunning one below from 2007, mapping steep declines to zero for the Itanium computers. (Click it for details.) You can look at the "Blackbird" proposal from an exhibit, too -- the one where HP sized up the pros and cons of buying Sun. (View the Blackbird)

A reporter from All Things D, the tech website run by the conservative Wall Street Journal, posted these emails and slides that were once secret, but now released by the court hearing lawsuits. Arik Hesseldal's article is must-reading for anyone who needs to plan an IT architecture or report on futures to CEOs or VPs of Finance. Hesseldal sums up HP's own view of the future of the company's only single-vendor 3000 migration target.

Key phrase: HP-UX, its version of Unix developed specifically for Itanium servers, “is on a death march” because of Itanium’s inevitable demise.

Why care, if you're already migrated off the 3000? It's as simple as an ostrich. If you've put your company's money on the HP-UX platform -- and think it's got a good run left in it -- you're hiding in the sand. It pains me to have to acknowledge anything that Larry Ellison's Oracle asserts. But there's no other reason to believe this won't work out the same as the 3000's evaporation off HP PowerPoints, strategy statements or price lists. The end is more than near. It's nearly here.

Update: HP's also dropped its own stink-bomb of documents, later in the same day, several emails plus pages of text message transcriptions between Oracle salesmen and execs. Most notable: an email from Lorraine Bartlett last March, just days before Oracle's pullout from Itanium. Bartlett, VP of Marketing for the HP-UX host Business Critical Systems, is effusive in praising her company's message about HP-UX futures. A "Kinetic" strategy from HP, shared with analysts in March that was "a bit hit, and really resonated," included messages about "HP-UX unbound" and a common socket design Intel was announcing give the Itanium chips the same underwear as Xeon chips. The texts between Oracle sales people and managers have a college frat-boy tone to them -- but seem to be in HP's bomb only to show that Oracle knew the HP-UX competitor Solaris was "a pig with lipstick." (Warning, salty language there.)

How close is the HP-UX end? Five years ago HP planned to end its Itanium revenues by 2013. Yeah, next year. Even that decision was costing the vendor $488 million over four years. HP spent it to keep its customers on HP-UX and the other OSs. All along, HP insisted again and again that Intel was doubling down on Itanium's future. It has even gotten some veteran customers to dig heads into the sand. That's easy to explain. Like concussion stats in US football, reports of HP leaving proprietary environments threaten long-time careers. Plus clients the size of Amtrak and McGraw-Hill.

At least now our community's customers can now see examples of the language and philosophy and schemes that made up the 3000's departure. "Don't possibly signal to world end of roadmap..." versus "We'll have roadmap updates in the future." A product relies on growth from the outside market, plus the technology becomes too costly for HP's budget. That's the 3000's story from HP's view. No different, except in number of customers, from today's Itanium story. Five years ago HP worked up an estimate of the price to move HP-UX to the commodity Xeon chips. About $100 million, it learned, to make the Itanium dead-end go away. But HP opted for a $88 million per year alternative with a short future for its commodity environments. It propped up the chip instead of reinvesting in development its own OS products. It made those decisions while its CEO slashed R&D budgets below the bone.

And that CEO continues to determine the future of HP-UX, even after HP fired him. See, Mark Hurd got himself hired by a company working to kill off HP's Unix. Larry Ellison called the board's ouster of Hurd -- after Hurd's creepy and sad debacle of chasing a reality TV actress, instead of his wife -- one of the worst decisions HP ever made. With the release of these secret emails, it looks like HP made a decision even worse. To a customer who uses HP's Unix, VMS or NonStop, HP never should have let a competitor in the Unix market hire Hurd.

A few months ago a respected tech icon in the NonStop market wrote about the future of HP-UX. Dr. Bill Highleyman thought that the forecast which I'd offered on Itanium was dubious -- that announcing an Odyssey project to get the best of HP's Unix onto Linux meant the end of Itanium, therefore also HP-UX -- and it was nearby. I would invite Dr. Highleyman, plus anyone in our community who remembers losing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars of MPE business, to have a look at the archive of documents that's been curated by All Things D.

Some of the least fortunate customers will now have to migrate away from HP's Unix. Or they can live in the fine-tuned OS afterlife beyond HP. Given the health of Hewlett-Packard's business these days, maybe that post-HP afterlife will seem more lively.

At the least, life in the afterlife will honor the economic advantage of an OS built for a chip the vendor owns, like MPE and PA-RISC. Unix planners are being invited on an HP Odyssey to commodity computing. How anybody can cost-justify that journey, instead of a genuine commodity solution -- well, that feels like a well-kept secret. What's going to be out in the open in the lawsuit trial is more muck, and murk, around the genuine future of the last proprietary OS that HP's ever going to build.

Emails show HP studied Itanium's end in '07

Oracle released a thick sheaf of HP emails this week to prove HP-UX has a dim future. Oracle sells an alternative to HP's Unix, Solaris, a campaign led by former HP CEO Mark Hurd. There's juicy goo in these pages that shows how a loyal customer base using an HP product gets treated during that product's downturn.

In Oracle's campaign to convince customers that HP's been managing an Itanium demise for years, lawsuit emails are the ammo. The two companies are at legal war by now, dueling lawsuits that will go to trial later this year. HP wants a database for its Itanium server customers. Oracle wants to quit maintaining development for the Integrity machines. Being ever-eager to do battle, Oracle released documents for the public to "use in deciding who's right about Itanium's future." You can look over the originals online. The emails are from HP executives and are part of the lawsuit evidence.

Over and over, in emails between the GM of Business Critical Systems Martin Fink and others at the top of HP's computing food chain, the messages show that Itanium -- and the future of HP's Unix -- has long had an inevitable end. One that HP has seen clearly and communicated less so. HP has been pressing Intel to continue with Itanium development for almost five years by now. While Hewlett-Packard hasn't been planning the end of HP-UX, the end of Itanium amounts to nearly the same thing -- because HP's Unix won't ever be ported to the Xeon/x86 Intel processors.

The flood of HP's email from Oracle offers a look into HP's corporate plan to hang onto enterprise customers who use a proprietary HP enterprise platform. It's a situation similar to the one HP 3000 users faced in 2001, when Hewlett-Packard made an internal decision to stop developments on MPE/iX and to shift onto the Itanium hardware. HP held all the cards in that decision: OS, PA-RISC chip design and manufacture, even the database. This Email-Gate, however, shows how relying on Intel and Oracle for the Unix chip and database left HP with a "binodal" choice, according to a 2007 company email to HP's Executive Council. At that time HP was a strong supporter of converting your HP 3000 to a Unix system.

Binodal, for anyone not familiar with thermodynamics, is "the boundary between the set of conditions in which it is thermodynamically favorable for the system to be fully mixed, and the set of conditions in which it is thermodynamically favorable for it to phase separate." HP had a point in '07 where Intel told the vendor that carrying Itanium further required core redesign. Costly, in the set of conditions to rebuild. Or Intel could crash-land the processor family, and move away from the wreckage.

"The choices appear binodal," said the email from Joe Lee in Sept. '07 about Itanium strategy. "An expensive plan vs. a crash landing. [Intel CEO] Paul [Otellini] added that we need to address the inevitable on the future of Itanium, stressed that Intel cannot keep losing money on the product line, and asserted that what's really needed is a compelling migration story."

That would be a migration from the Itanium-driven Integrity servers to the HP ProLiant systems run by the Xeon family of chips. HP didn't tell Intel it was developing a project called Octane, a next-gen mission-critical business system run on AMD chips. "[CTO] Shane [Robison] says they are most freaked about Octane," Lee wrote, "but discovering what we weren't porting HP-UX rocked their world. Shane wants the data on what it will take to port HP-UX to x86."

That's a port that Fink just told the world wouldn't be happening. Itanium's leash looked so short in '07 that both sides thought it wouldn't be alive in 2014. HP might have had a reason to move its Unix forward, if they'd bought Sun like they proposed in 2009. There's a fascinating PowerPoint deck that describes that proposal, too. HP figured it might help prolong Itanium's lifespan.

The HP documents released by Oracle are online in a Scribd storage area for anyone to read. One PowerPoint deck says that HP-UX "is on a death march" because of Itanium's demise. But HP was more worried about IBM at that point than about Oracle. IBM might have bought Sun, and "it [then] isolates and exposes HP-UX as 3rd tier player, accelerates our decline (product/service) as customers look to consolidate vendors." HP threw its money into supporting extra Intel manufacture and design of Itanium's 9300 and Poulson series, while Oracle gambled on the Sun Unix. The lawsuit's outcome might help determine who won in the short run.

Link-In, to put 3000 over the 500-pro mark

We're now very close, up on LinkedIn. The HP 3000 Community on the business social network counts 497 members as of today, a collective of hundreds of developers, managers, consultants, employers and software suppliers. After four years of connecting, we're just three members short of the magic 500+ mark for this group. You can put this group into the special ranking, by simply joining it. LinkedIn ranks members of 500-plus groups higher when searches are returned. Searches like someone pursuing experience, expertise, or a skill like coding business applications.

The members of the HP 3000 Community have all of that. So many of them come from the ranks of 3000 IT development and management pros. An IT manager leading a group that maintains and develops apps for a hotel chain. A support manager for a vendor who's still got 3000 customers using a document management tool. The inside sales manager at the largest remaining COBOL vendor in the market.

Join us, and become better connected to your colleagues and employers.

LinkedIn is free at its basic level, which is all you need to join the HP 3000 Community. And for a modest upcharge of $20-$30 monthly, LinkedIn will send your mail directly to other members that you'll find in groups like this one. LinkedIn even guarantees a response to its InMail (by providing you with an additional InMail, if your first goes unanswered.)

Another advantage to joining a large group: you have more people to link with elsewhere, because you've got something in common -- group membership. These personal links also boost your profile, according to job recruiter Linda Tuerk.

Tuerk told the members of the CAMUS users group that getting to the 500 level is important to making LinkedIn a successful tool.

Link with as many members as you can. Some experts say that you will only show up in search results for your skillset only 3 percent of the time if you are linked to fewer than 200 people. That incidence is supposed to climb to 90 percent if you are linked to "500+." Look for "Open Networkers" and LIONs that will link with everybody. Drop them later if you like.

Add Groups related to your professional field. You are allowed 50. Concentrate on ones that have thousands of members at first, then add local ones that seem relevant and have at least 100. Check them out, and as you near your 50 Group maximum, drop some that are less relevant and add the most relevant for you. Most have jobs tabs. Link to Group members you like or that have 500+ connections. Find jobs on Discussion tabs also.

There's more details on how to use a group membership and LinkedIn to improve a job search at Tuerk's post here in the NewsWire blog. LinkedIn group membership is a great way to stay in touch with a community that can seem smaller, if you believe some reports. Let us hear from you.

Smiles, but less joking at 2012's HP Discover

HP's announced its executive keynote lineup for the June HP Discover 2012 show, the biggest HP-centric conference for the year. At the last HP Discover the company was still debating with Oracle over the future of the database on HP servers, but it stood on the verge of a splash into the tablet marketplace. That was just two months before the TouchPad belly-flop and one quarter in front of the ouster of a second CEO in as many years.

Current CEO Meg Whitman will speak on Making Technology Work for You, "focusing on the challenges that enterprises face today, and the breadth and depth of HP solutions that help them to address those challenges." The conference runs June 4-7 in its usual location on the Las Vegas strip, this time at the Venetian Hotel and Sands Convention Center. A SWSMYT code at registration earns a $300 discount.

Like last year, another Discover keynoter has a strong entertainment platform. DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg will be onstage with Whitman and later hosts an exclusive preview of DreamWorks' Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted. Less obvious comedy won't be on the stage this year, after Jake Johannsen opened for CEO Leo Apotheker in 2011. One ironic Johannsen joke that's not likely to be recycled: "As a comic, it seems to me there'd be a joke I could make about HP's last CEO... but there's not."

Whitman might not see the humor in such a barb, but the commentary on HP's show -- produced with the aid of the Connect user group -- may run just as unfettered. Last year the vendor hosted a raft of bloggers in a new program to earn more notice for the conference. Geekzone made the conference a feature on its tech blog, and the longest keynote of that show was an HP Cloud marathon full of boardroom-level buzzwords for IT planners. HP's putting the buzz on after-hours with a closing show a bit less legendary than last year's Sir Paul McCartney concert. The closing celebration sponsored by Intel starts with Sheryl Crow and finishes with the founder of the Eagles, Don Henley.

The executive VP of HP's enterprise computing business is now Dave Donatelli, more entrenched than ever after HP kicked Ann Livermore into the company's board of directors suite. Donatelli leads the list which HP offered of its key executives speaking at the show. Todd Bradley appears, now executive vice president of both Printing and Personal Systems, even after that TouchPad debacle. Others include Bill Veghte, chief strategy officer and EVP for HP Software; Mike Lynch, executive vice president, Information Management; and John Visentin, executive vice president for the company's support and consulting arm, Enterprise Services.

HP's Q2 '12 quarterly results report (on May 23) will be about two weeks behind in the rear view mirror when HP Discover opens up. This has always been a show aimed at an audience well below the financial analyst crowd. The company discounts professional certification for IT workers who attend. Last year's show had more than 10,000 attendees and 1,000 partners on hand, the vendor reported.

Discovering something to hear before the gentle humor of Madagascar or the dulcet tones of Crow can be planned using the online session discovery tool at the event's website. Three months ago, only four sessions were listed online as being delivered from customers. Now that wing of content is beefed up to 160 with the likes of a strategy review from Brian O'Reilly of the Las Vegas Sands, who's giving a case study to show "how Las Vegas Sands (Venetian) accelerated its IT transformation program." IT managers from Royal Bank of Canada, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida, and payroll provider Paychex will also speak.

Emulation advocate could smooth licenses

At yesterday's demonstration of the current HPA/3000 virtualization engine -- you'd know it as The Emulator -- tech success was in abundance. Everything that the product manager Paul Taffel showed off during the spring CAMUS RUG meeting worked as expected. One hour of demo without a single crash. Glance, third party database tools, even something as esoteric as the OCTCOMP object code translator that HP built, the one that ensures that Classic 3000 programs will run on the PA-RISC systems of the modern era.

That last item was no slower than it behaves under HP's 3000 iron. Taffel was showing off the N-Class version of HPA/3000, and he was doing the demo on a $1,300 PC using a paltry 4GB of RAM within 16GB on a Linux PC.

My test Linux system has 16 GB of memory (although we only recommend or need 8 GB for the A400 emulator).  I was running our N4000-100-750 emulator, with 2 GB of memory available to the virtual HP 3000, and I mentioned that I was actually only using about 4 GB of memory at the time (including Linux overhead). I'm not sure that increasing the memory allocated to the virtual HP 3000 would have resulted in any noticeable speed-up, at least during the relatively low load tests that I was performing.

The marvel of the HPA/3000 design is that it has no measurable ceiling for top performance. Intel will keep improving its chip speeds. That puts more horsepower at the command of this engine.

Licensing advocacy might speed up sales. Some vendors are going to want to test for the market's only 3000 emulator and need to recover the lab costs. Others see a need for more real-world tests. HPA/3000 isn't a software-software interaction, however. Taffel says there's no MPE/iX emulation going on in HPA/3000. Every feature of the 3000's OS operates the same, right down to intrinsics. Yes, even the end-of-2027 date bug exists in the emulated solution.

Terry Floyd suggested that an organization like the storied SIGSOFTVEND could assist in getting 3000 apps and essential tools certified. Taffel called the business that vendors could protect via emulator customers "like money for nothing. It's giving these vendors another few years of software support business."

That's true, unless few members of a vendor's supported customer base have mentioned the emulator. These vendors need to be convinced, by some advocate, that it's good business to include HPA/3000 sites on their approved list. Without any evidence they're going to lose money if they don't do HPA/3000 tests, vendors could play the short game and aim tech resources elsewhere. A 3000 software vendor organization is a good idea anyway, but the HPA/3000 gives it a real business focus. SIGSOFTVEND did its work with no overhead to speak of -- and that group was tracing the impact of HP's changes to MPE/iX. VEsoft's founder knows embracing HPA/3000 is simpler.

The nascent public interest from customers about HPA/3000 might be tied to the early days of the release cycle. At the moment there's a pricing issue for the size of some customers homesteading. We await a report of a sale from Stromasys.

Supported customers do leave a vendor, after awhile. But hesitation over emulator certification may be a sign that a vendor is looking at other places to invest right now, at least until the HPA/3000 gains some customer traction. This reticence represents the cost which HP levied by stalling the Stromasys product for five years. A green light when Stromasys was ready in 2002 would have yielded a product by 2005, or even 2008. At either time, software suppliers would've had a lot more customer support contracts to protect with emulator certifications. Taffel called that delay a tragedy, but he's on the job to create happier endings.

"It's a tragedy if you care about extending the HP 3000 lifetime," he said. "But I'm not singling anyone out for blame. That's just the way things worked out." Stromasys CTO Robert Boers was more explicit last fall about the source of the delay. Everyone agrees that selling this product four years ago would have been easier. As it turned out, HP had lost more than half its migrating sites to other vendors by the time it started to work with Stromasys on HPA/3000.

A test suite for software products need not be extensive, in order to keep them from being expensive. This product does nothing more than make Intel processors behave like PA-RISC chips. VEsoft's Vladimir Volokh said using MPEX on this platform -- a product which literally extends MPE -- didn't require software-software level testing, as far as he was concerned.

If an HPA/3000 prospect has got all in-house code -- and only needs the surround tools which are already certified by third parties -- then they're more likely to arrive on the emulator. Licensing, or even certification, can be very important to closing a sale. Some products like MANMAN don't even look for a HPSUSAN number. Floyd said that in the case of that app suite, it comes down to a matter of ethics. We would add, "and what your auditor expects about licensing."

Stromasys has never launched a product into a market where the vendor was totally absent, so long-gone that you may wonder if there's an HP 3000 license transfer mechanism running anymore. (HP says yes, and we've had reports from resellers who use it.) The customers think it exists, mostly. That's why the first-wave companies are going to be so important to the launch of HPA/3000. People want to see how others are handling the business matters of using an emulator -- and those decisions on licensing may be the crossroads of whether anyone will spend $25K to $100K on HPA/3000.

But at least after yesterday's meeting the world knows it works with MPEX and DBGENERAL and SHOWCLKS. It looks great, and there was a magic moment where an HP 3000 boot volume was duplicated, or compressed, using Ubuntu Linux. Taffel says at some point the product will be called a 1.0, instead of the prerelease 0.8.

Advocacy from someone in the community with business leadership could help include crucial tools on par with MB Foster's connectivity software, or even PowerHouse and Speedware. VEsoft's in a vanguard here with several other software companies fanned out with a few thousand sites. Stromasys can't do certification advocacy as well as a software supplier with deep roots in the 3000 community. There's selling of HPA/3000 to be done on more than one level. Without advocacy, it may be every HPA/3000 customer for themselves in arranging to use the solution with their third party software.

Entry N-Class 3000 demoed on $1300 iron

Stromasys is careful to tell its prospects for the HPA/3000 software that the emulator will be installed on higher-class PC hardware. But for this morning's demo of the product for the CAMUS user group, the product manager Paul Taffel used a $1,300 desktop system. The price included a solid state disk (SSD) drive.

The costs of 3000 hardware aren't a big factor in homesteading for some customers. One manager we interviewed last week cited the price of 3000 disk devices, however, as a reason to follow QSS onto Linux in a migration of their app. Would that company plan to remain on a 3000 if they could employ rock-bottom components and peripherals?

Put it this way: That's one less reason to need to plan for a different environment. It's a serious enough move off homesteading that some customers are taking two or more years to migrate. The product that Stomasys calls a virtualization engine will be eliminating the need to find HP's 9GB drives and shrink wrap them as spares. During the demo, Taffel accessed a 9 GB file -- yes, a file -- that stands in for the 3000's drive. This instance of the 3000 had an MPE/iX 7.5 installation.

Using an SSD to host LDEV 1, while running MPE applications and even HP's diagonostics on $1,300 of iron, should provide a hard reset of what a 3000 will be in the years to come. It's even possible to run a 3000 without so much as a power cord for awhile. The HPA/3000 will run on a laptop.

HP's 3000 managers, generally, find futures beyond the designs of HP

I had an afternoon this week that felt like a ride in a time machine. I was turning the pages of a glossy user group magazine, devoted to HP server products. The HP 3000 was even mentioned in its opening pages. And there on an introductory page, right after an HP print ad, was an HP general manager who was bidding his customers farewell, moving out of a division.

But I only had to blink to notice the differences. The magazine was The Connection, 36 pages plus its covers devoted to the world of NonStop servers, the ones you might know as Tandems. The print ad was not devoted to HP iron, but to time software for the NonStop's OS. And that general manager, you may have guessed, was Winston Prather, saying farewell to another of his server customer bases.

Six men have been general managers of HP's 3000 business since the middle 1980s, but Prather is the only one who's remained at HP. Some of the rest have retired to private practices (Rich Sevcik, now an ardent evangelist in the classic sense of that word; Harry Sterling, enjoying a life in real estate) or have simply left HP for the next chapter of their business lives. Dave Wilde, the last fellow to hold the job, even was welcomed at last fall's HP 3000 Reunion. That was a conference which another of the ex-GMs expressed an interest in and best wishes toward: Glenn Osaka left HP before Prather even took his job, and is now working at Juniper Networks.

Networks hold the next opportunity for Prather, an executive best known for the "it was my decision" to end the 3000's futures at HP. This time he's left the NonStop group in the hands of an engineer who's tackling his first GM job at HP. That's the exact position Prather assumed in 1999 -- before he and others at the vendor gave your storied server the paddling it never deserved.

In his farewell Connection column where he passed on leadership of another Business Critical Systems unit, this one to Ric Lewis, Prather bubbled with familiar platform enthusiasm as he headed back to engineering management. With "mixed feelings" he wrote about enjoying his days in the NonStop family.

As NonStop customers and partners, you know that NonStop has been providing unique value for over 35 years. The products have evolved to keep up with the times: modern hardware, open standards and development environments. As I move on to the next stage of my career, let me leave you with a few thoughts. NonStop is truly a special business. You can see it in the products. You can see it in the dedication of the employees. And mostly you can see it in the statements that you, our customers and partners, make about how you depend on NonStop.

The customers' dependence on an HP product was not an element in his 3000 decision -- unless he was counting the number of customers. Prather, unlike the community's most-admired 3000 GM Sterling, is moving out of general manager work into HP's Networking unit, one of the few places where HP's still showing profitability growth. He's now Global VP of Engineering there, a management assignment not entirely unlike the R&D Manager job that he toiled at under Sterling in the 3000 division.

Olivier Helleboid, the GM who helmed the 3000 group as we started the 3000 NewsWire, has gone on to become VP of Product Management at Intuit. His encouragement gave us the green light to launch the publication. Sure, that era of mid-90s -- and even before, in the simplicity of the '80s -- might be adequately summed up in the language Prather chose while leaving yet another HP server group. This latest one, he says, can outlive his tenure because it has modern hardware, open standards and development environments. With the notable exception of living beyond his career aspirations, that all sounds familiar.

When Prather cut off the 3000, its PA-RISC hardware -- when unhobbled by management's OS decisions -- was as fast as any other server HP sold; Itanium didn't even have a worthy system to ship. The 3000 was struggling toward adopting modern backplane tech, projects that languished as Prather led the 3000 lab. Y2K was too much stress for those labs, and the new PCI-based servers were as seriously late as the first PA-RISC 3000s were in the '80s. Very little sold as new systems in the years around Y2K. Sales were stymied by the "its coming soon" drumbeats about the N and A Classes. Back in the '80s on the cusp of new RISC tech, the 3000 had management champions to pull the engineering oxcart out of the ditch. No champions could be found at the very end of the '90s. Marching in place with his proscribed headcount was Prather's path into a declining future.

It was his future vision that killed HP's business. In those days MPE, which had been turned toward its Unix features under Osaka's watch, had the same then-current calibre of open standards that NonStop enjoys today. As a GM Prather's predecessor Sterling made sure the division was devoted to the Internet; it captured its first set of open source tools. Development of partner apps had drawn to a standstill after one year of Prather's decisions, something that was due to marketing responses, product delivery and commodity competition. At that point Prather told us that as a GM it wasn't his job to sell 3000s -- just to deliver the right server to the customer from HP's many choices. Later that year he ended HP's 3000 life.

Now that HP is losing ground in such unique server markets, the GM who tolled HP's death knell for its 3000 unit has moved into a commodity unit, Networking. He's rid of the decisions about what to build next, because a higher level of manager will approve the calls that were his to make for the 3000 business. Being tied to a proprietary environment business is becoming a burden for career growth, where execs are measured by revenue increases and rising partner counts. Prather has gotten himself paroled from HP's proprietary jail.

It took a 3000 manager to sum up the last five years of Prather's career, a summary that invoked HP 3000 work on Prather's watch. Connect President Steve Davidek, who we interviewed in a 2010 Q&A, thanks "Winston for his support while at the NonStop Enterprise Division." Davidek said the move "is great news for Winston."

I first met Winston while I was giving the World Wide Advocacy Survey results to HP. Winston was still managing the HP 3000 division at the time. The survey results showed HP that, again, they loved their 3000s but the HP contracts were still a pain.

There was a lot more HP pain to come for Prather's customers and partners. He drank deep from HP's proposals for Unix, predicting at an Interex meeting in February, 2002 that more than 80 percent of the customers would be migrated within a few years. Instead, HP lost two of every three departing customers to other vendors. But HP had an enterprise unit to streamline after buying up Compaq's DEC business. Prather got his bosses to approve the elimination of a unit that was shipping current technology, bearing standards support and boasting a partner network more than 30 years old.

Those components are not enough to survive in HP when your leadership dedicated to the vendor, rather than the customer. Five other men found a circuit beyond HP's changing ways. It's telling to see that only Prather stays plugged in today.

Licenses crank engines of 3000 virtualization

In a few days Stromasys will update the MANMAN community about its virtualization product that mimics 3000s using Intel hardware. Instead of calling it an emulator, we'll try to stay current and call this software what Stromasys calls it: a virtualization engine. We'll know more about the tech details and the current sales impact next week.

But in the meantime the applications which run on that 3000 iron need licensing. Either they need support fees paid, or in some cases the app itself requires a license fee. Sometimes unexpectly, a fee like this on a homestead 3000 can catapault into an unprecedented tier.

That's what happened to Sako Badalian at Rockwell Collins. The manufacturer of smart communications and aviation electronics in jet fighters uses a 3000 to run MANMAN, software that's now owned by Infor. Badalian reached out to ask if anybody else who uses MANMAN saw a 240 percent increase in the annual fees paid to Infor. That's the bill that Rockwell Collins received from the fifth company to own MANMAN, software whose ownership swaps date back to the 1980s. (CA, Interbiz, SSA Global and Infor have bought the software's customers and the code over that period.)

You would think that after a decade or more of no enhancements to an app, its fees wouldn't rise. But you'd be wrong, apparently, and this practice has become the one of the cranks that turns a 3000 virtualization engine.

There's a much larger field of homesteading 3000 customers for Stromasys to capture. They run custom code and apps, in-house software. Their licenses are limited to the independent tools used by IT pros who've been on the 3000 job for several decades. The vendors such as Adager, VEsoft, Robelle, Minisoft, MB Foster and Hillary Software, having made their initial sales, just want to maintain their service to the customers. These customers buying the Stromasys engines are unlikely to experience what Badalian bemoaned this week to his fellow MANMAN managers.

My main concern is the term license fee that Infor is charging us for use of MANMAN on the HP 3000. Infor has raised the annual term license fee and one-year support for MANMAN by 240 percent over last year's fees. What I am asking is: have your annual term fees increased substantially for this year? If yes, then did Infor notify you of this unexpectedly large annual fee increase?

Infor may not understand that its revenues for MANMAN are not going to go up by 200 percent using this strategy. Faced with this kind of increase, a 3000 owner will find a way not to pay. Some homesteaders don't have that kind of extra budget on hand, especially for a mission-critical app which they enhance themselves, or pay separately to have improved. Not all of the homesteader cost-cutting is going to come through migrations, however.

The higher profile the MANMAN site, the less room it has to economize on this license and remain an Infor customer. If Infor, Escalate (nee Ecometry) Amisys and other packaged app providers don't crank the virtualization engines for their customers, cloud solutions will rise up in their place. As it turns out, one of those solutions has been built using expertise from MANMAN's creators, ASK Software.

Some customers don't want to be tied to platforms anymore, and their genuine risks in using the cloud are offset by unexpected 240 percent price increases. They will also get a shot at virtualization, too, so long as there's some way to move to custom, in-house 3000 apps. (MANMAN has become this very thing over the last two decades, for the lucky customers who have the right to their source code.) Stromasys will be offering a cloud-based HPA/3000 engine later this year.

3000 community awaits business simulation

Owners and suppliers of HP 3000 systems were counting down today to the rollout of the Hewlett-Packard Business Simulator, the first application designed to turn server clocks back to pre-Y2K settings to normalize enterprise operations. The software-hardware combination, scheduled to roll out in 2007, makes its debut this year, triggered when the vendor's Legacy Calendars Division corrected a five-year timing error in embedded HP 3000 history chips.

CEO Meg Whitman, corrected last month on the age of the company by shareholders old enough to know better, said her executive staff deployed the Day Runner app technology in WebOS to learn that the long-awaited simulator was just as overdue as the 70th anniversary of the company.

"We never meant to fall this far behind on the HP-BS app," Whitman said in a brief statement at the end of March. "We were timing it to coincide with our 70th birthday, which turns out to have been a few years ago." Whitman said the New-News architecture of the chips was thrown off by the four-year delay in retiring HP's 3000 operations, which were scheduled to expire just before HP's actual 70th anniversary. Division R&D manager Oltston Rather said that when the 3000 ops continued to operate, the BS app remained in streaming mode.

The simulator is designed to recreate business opportunities that existed when Hewlett-Packard was selling four vendor-designed enterprise environments, including MPE/iX. The Y2K date was chosen to match the last period when HP stock was trading high enough to split, while new 3000 sales still boosted the company's top as well as bottom lines.

Rather said that instead of installing the BS app in datacenters, customers will recreate the Y2K conditions in the HP Cloud. A new HP Cloud Discovery Workshop demystifies and simplifies this complex world by using human-sized displays which lay out strategies to utilize this new computing environment.

"It's a pie in the sky condition we're generating," Rather said. "Customers would prefer to work in a time when our business and financial success was more in line with our innovative R&D. As profit-sharing employees, so would we."

HP 3000 Product Futures at Fresche Legacy

Long ago -- in the distant past of a computer so storied that it has a distant past -- 4GLs promised extra hours on the clock and extra days on the calendar. Although HP tried for a foothold in 4th Generation Languages, only two companies made a 3000 business of it. Both Cognos and Speedware products still drive 3000s today, 28 years after the ad above appeared in Interact magazine.

Speedware didn't use its product name to indentify the company back then. Starting this week, it will once again have a name that differs from its established 4GL. It was Infocentre back then, a company with a word in its name spelled differently. Now it's Fresche Legacy, but it's still supporting the same 4GL that it was selling three decades ago.

Fresche Legacy's president and CEO Andy Kulakowski said this week that Speedware, the 4GL, remains in place on the new company's price list. He even promised there will be enhancements, some to the version of the 4GL that runs on 3000s -- if customers demand them. The ISV Softvoyage, for example, still builds its travel-business apps on a bedrock of Speedware.

"As they need new features in the wide variety of operating systems they support," Kulakowski said, "we continue to evolve Speedware to support them. That will continue based on customer demand. We feel very loyal to those customers. We still have resources in house that are continuing to make changes to those products. There are a couple of enhancements that were made over the course of this year for the 4GL."

Several other products at Fresche Legacy have HP 3000 connections, but they relate to the ability to migrate or alternative-host MPE/iX applications and data. Kulakowski said those products have a future in the new company business plan, too.

"We continue to invest in the Speedware software tools," he said in the re-branding interview last week. "Our customers are still on active support contracts.We don’t have any plans to decline our interests anywhere. This is a growth story, this isn’t a replacement story."

New sales of 4GLs on MPE/iX are a long-shot at best, for both Cognos as well as Fresche Legacy. The president acknowledged that customers who want new Speedware features, for example, are much more likely to deploy them on non-MPE versions of what are now called Advanced Development Tools (ADT).

"We see much less demand from the 3000 customer, but we’ll evolve the [ADT] product to meet their needs," the company's president said. "With MPE being in the state that it’s in, if customers have environments where applications are evolving, growing or critical to the business, it’s quite likely that they’re looking to migrate and transform that onto a lower-risk platform."

Kulakowski was speaking of a Speedware platform. The company says it's been migrating 3000 sites for 15 years, farther back than the HP exit announcement -- because a migration before 2002 was likely to be from one platform of Speedware to another.

That experience in 3000 migrations gave Speedware a road into the future. Activant purchased the company to capitalize on the newer application-based customers which Speedware Ltd. acquired in the post-HP-exit years. But Activant only cared about the migration business at Speedware because it was high-profit, Kulakowski explained.

"In that era, having been owned by Activant Solutions, they were not interested in sustaining this business for very long," he said. "They didn’t know the HP 3000 migration community, and they were somewhat indifferent to it. Because we were a very solid business, they were very interested in the operating margins we generated with it."

Migration skills can be transferred between markets, however, if a company can locate and acquire the human resource and tools for a fresh market. In the MPE world the tool AMXW, purchased from Neartek in 2003, powered many of the Speedware migrations. Over the past year its legacy modernization business has been in the IBM marketplace. Speedware has acquired software tools there, as well as skills in the OS 400 and mainframe Series Z technologies. Kulakowski says the IBM success in 2011 reduced the element of risk in buying itself back from Activant in 2010.

"This year we got a lot of validation on how to sustain our business," he said, "and why we were anxious to buy our business from the previous owners. We got validation on the kind of skills we have and how leveragable they are in other markets. With our ability to provide new skills there, we reduced a lot of risk in that original [repurchase] investment."

So while software will remain a part of business at Fresche Legacy, newer opportunities beckon from outside an era where a product which cut code faster than COBOL development was the engine for company growth. Moving customers gave Speedware a way to move itself, even while its software remains in place.

"While we were developing our expertise in HP 3000 migration, we were sitting back and looking at this in self defense," Kulakowski said of the other platform skills. "We have expanded beyond the HP 3000 community to something larger than only the 3000 space. Especially after this year, we can say confidently we got a lot validation in those new markets. But we have abolutely no plans on sunsetting enhancements to the Speedware family of products."

 

How old is HP, anyway? Now its CEO knows

Computerworld is reporting this morning on another element in HP's annual shareholder meeting. Yesterday the company announced its Global Sales group is now part of an uber-unit including enterprise servers. Oh, and PCs and printers now come from the same group. But the gathering of officers and investors, some less institutional and older than its CEO, included a history lesson. The newest CEO apparently didn't know the age of HP.

Meg Whitman, who's been on the HP board even longer than her seven-month tenure as CEO, has been telling the world HP celebrates its 70th birthday in 2014. HP's one of the few Silicon Valley companies that old, she brags. Except that birthday already arrived almost three years ago. In 2014, HP will be 75, "according to the company's website," Computerworld said in its story. Of the "70 in 2014," it said

It's a line Whitman's been using for the past few months as she tries to drum up enthusiasm for the new, reinvigorated HP she hopes to build. The only trouble is, it appears to be wrong, as an elderly shareholder gently pointed out to her.

"I believe HP was founded in 1939," he said during the question-and-answer session after her talk. Wouldn't that make HP 75 in 2014?

"For three or four months I've been telling people we're going to set HP up for the next 70 years because we're 70 years old, and you're the first person to correct me on that, so thanks very much," Whitman said.

The Computerworld story also noted questions from the shareholders about why HP couldn't be as successful as Apple (whose market valuation is now 10 times HP's). Or why there couldn't be HP stores, like Apple's, to get a product repaired, instead of a three-week shipment of a replacement printer across the US. In her Apple replies, Whitman acknowledged the genius of Steve Jobs -- a fellow whose brief history of HP employment occured less than 40 years ago.

There will be fewer sales people employed at HP soon, based on a reading of what Whitman said at the meeting. Adding sales executives didn't produce extra sales, she said, "so we're going to reorganize ... and make sure we get our costs back in line with our revenues."

HP shuffles to protect print-ink, server biz

Remember when the HP printer business drove the company's profits and revenues? As recently as 2003, the Imaging and Printing Group generated 55 percent of HP's income, an amount that led one IBM speaker at a 3000 conference to call HP "Inky." Today HP poured its printer and ink business -- which spews its profits from those $20 cartridges -- into the company's PC bucket.

At the same time that the declining fortunes of printing triggered this sea change, Hewlett-Packard sent its Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN) group into a much broader new segment, called the HP Enterprise Group. ESSN joins HP Technology Services (think consulting and cloud) and Global Accounts Sales -- which will be getting a new sales chief. Jan Zadak, a Czech EE with a Ph.D. from the Czech Technical University, is stepping down as Sales EVP after 10 years at HP. He arrived in the Compaq merger. David Donatelli, who joined HP in 2009 from EMC in a contested hiring, will lead Sales, Tech Services, and ESSN .

Few sales efforts in HP have battled headwinds as hard as the ones buffeting ESSN. It sells Linux and Windows servers based on the popular Intel Xeon family with some success, but also the HP-UX, NonStop and VMS environments that are subsisting on an existing base. Hewlett-Packard is working the IBM markets for new Unix installs. But that ex-mainframe business tends to go to Windows when HP succeeds, as it did at Yale-New Haven Hospital not long ago. The hospital wasn't replacing its HP 3000s, by the way.

The slackening sails of printer and ink sales pulled EVP Vyomesh Joshi into retirement. Known as VJ during his 32 years at HP, the executive also arrived with an EE degree, going to work in R&D. He's on the Yahoo board of directors.

Todd Bradley, who joined HP from Palm Computing and took over PCs in 2005, now takes the helm on an HP vessel that analysts are calling "trailing business." It's market-speak for products in decline, and for the moment the decline is around printing -- selling at 2005 levels by now -- rather than PCs. But HP hasn't shown any more PC growth in the last three years than anyone else in the business not named Apple. PCs have been flat to declining. Bradley now is the king of the consumer end of HP, the one that former director Dick Hackborn puffed up through the '90s with retailed ink and printers, and in the early Oughts with PCs. The days of HP-branded music players, TVs and cameras as leading businesses are over. A single camera pops up on the HP website today, and the HP flatscreens are history, too.

HP still says it's the leader in PC and printer fields, and by market share this is true. "This combination will bring together two businesses where HP has established global leadership,” said CEO Meg Whitman. “By providing the best in customer-focused innovation and operational efficiency, we believe we will create a winning scenario for customers, partners and shareholders."

It's not the first time the businesses have been combined. Carly Fiorina pushed the move through just a few weeks before HP ousted her in 2005. The replacement CEO Mark Hurd reversed the move soon after he arrived.

HP portrayed the combination of the ESSN business with Sales and Services as a way to "streamline certain key business functions." It's making these moves to "speed decision making, increase productivity and improve efficiency, while providing a simplified customer experience." HP still must cut its expenses to feed the refreshed R&D spending that Whitman said the company needs immediately. Streamlining can be corporate code for headcount reductions. A simpler customer experience can be handled by fewer employees in sales when there's less being sold.

The impact on the 3000 community from the HP moves will be limited to any sites which are still in the process of migrating their enterprise servers. Hewlett-Packard hopes the new setup will make it simpler to shift from HP 3000s to Integrity servers, for example. Or simply update storage and networking; the latter is one of the few spots that showed year over year growth in the latest HP report.

 

Speedware leaps into Fresche Legacy brand

Speedware is growing beyond its 36-year-old company brand starting today, becoming Fresche Legacy. The move that completes the company's 2010 repurchase of itself from Activant aligns it with a new business focus on IT legacy management. While the company continues to support HP 3000 software products like its 4GL and migration tools, it will take mission-critical applications and enhance them to support the growth of business needs.

It's also aimed at making IT less of a fire-fighter at a company, to evolve into more of a value generator for customers. The rebranding includes a motto of "IT can make you smile." President Andy Kulakowski says the expansion of the Speedware mission flows from engagements with legacy users outside of the HP 3000 community.

"We know this is very bold," Kulakowski said. "Rebranding ourselves is a demonstration of how much we believe in this. Here we are dropping a name we’ve held for 36 years. We felt it was a good to rebrand ourselves according to the new value propositions we offer. Legacy tends to have a negative connotation because it refers to old stuff. We call it Fresche Legacy because that’s what we do: freshen up legacy environments. We make people happy with our 100 percent referenceability track record, and we really believe that IT can make you smile."

The HP 3000 business opportunities for the company over the past fiscal year didn't include any migration project start-ups, he added. It was the first in 15 years without a transfer or replacement of a 3000 customer's operations. Kulakowski noted that three application support contracts were launched last year for the HP 3000 segment at what's now Fresche Legacy. The Speedware 4GL enhancements are still being engineered as needed by the customers, along with migration-related software such as AMXW, he added.

"We’re still very loyal to the HP 3000 and active in the community," he said. "That doesn’t change for us. It’s served us well for 36 years, and we’ll continue to serve our customers with the same care. The Speedware brand will continue. It’s a brand that represents the software tools of the past, including the migration tools of the last several years."

What's been growing for awhile at Speedware has been engagements in the IBM mainframe and AS/400 replacement business. In July, 2010 on the heels of its buyback from Activant, Speedware joined HP in a drive to get IBM customers onto HP's Unix, Linux and Windows servers. That effort provided AS/400 legacy modernization solutions in tandem HP. Hewlett-Packard has worked since 2003 to get IBM customers to adopt HP-UX. Speedware also purchased the ML-iMPACT code conversion tool for AS/400s in 2010.

"We realized we had developed another skill: how exactly to perform migration projects, and how to modernize legacy environments," Kulakowski said. "Hence, this dream we started in 2010 to get back our company, and convert this skill in migrating and managing legacy applications into bigger markets. It’s bigger opportunity and bigger business."

Fresche Legacy will be run by the same group of executives, handling greater responsibilities. Christine McDowell, who's been focused on strategic alliances and sales, now has an expanded role in marketing. McDowell has pointed to "customers frustrated with the limitations inherent in the [IBM] platform," adding that owners among IBM's 200,000 AS/400 and Series 1 servers are reaching out to Speedware and HP.

Chris Koppe, formerly the company's marketing director and more recently its business development leader, has stepped up to be responsible for building corporate strategy, exploring new opportunities in new marketplaces. Maria Anzini, the company's director of customer support for many years, will expand her responsibilities into human resources. "She’s not only responsible for relationships with customers, but more importantly, relationships with our own employees," Kulakowski said of Anzini.

The shift to a legacy management strategy has been urged along by curtailed 3000 migrations. “Quite frankly, we thought that would take a little longer," Kulakowski said. "We thought that HP 3000 migrations would be a significant contributor to the business. As it turns out, we were forced into this transition a lot sooner than we thought — and it ended up being a good thing for us. We’ve completed our transformation a lot quicker than we might’ve envisioned two years ago."

Application support engagements for 3000 sites have arrived from both new and existing Speedware customers. “Because of a great relationship, they trusted us to do application support for them," the president said. "In another case, it’s a brand-new customer who was looking for someone to mitigate their risk of their retiring HP 3000 skills.”

The fresh business at Speedware over the last year came from IBM sites where legacy management meant reducing risks. These newer customers "are running projects on the AS/400 and IBM mainframe replacement," Kulakowski said. "This is why we’ve repositioned ourselves as a legacy management company, for environments that have complex, mission-critical applications in them. We transform them to lower-cost, lower-risk, more modern operating platforms."

That doesn't limit Fresche Legacy to migrations and replacements, he stressed.

"We have something to offer regardless of where a CIO wants to bring their legacy," Kulakowski said. "We respond well to retiring, rehosting, and re-architecting legacy environments, or just looking for app support services. We’re positioning ourselves as a legacy management company, instead of just a legacy moderization company."

The company's preparing for a move in May to new offices in the up and coming Griffintown section of Montreal.

"Springtime is a great time to be aligned with what we’re doing with the business," Kulakowski said. "As we freshen up our image and the company, we’re very excited."

IBM's legacy platform grapples with future

IBM has risen on the radar of the companies supplying expertise to legacy tech users. While "legacy" has a distinct sound of a sneer coming from a pop-tech provider, these legacy systems like HP 3000s, AS/400s and mainframes drive a lot of business in our modern day. When you drive even deeper into legacy to consider COBOL, the population using it swells to a majority.

The situation in IBM's legacy world bears a close look, so you can see how a vendor the size of Big Blue is handling less-trendy tech customers. IBM has continued to update the server system that's viewed as a close cousin to the HP 3000. However, a lot of the customers who use what's now called "System i" haven't updated anything since the servers were called AS/400s. As it turns out, the term AS/400 is considered a sneering epithet, according to a report at the System i Network. Trevor Perry, a consultant in that market, explains.

The debate is not about the name, but how we perceive the platform. If we see it as an AS/400, we will use it like it is 20 or 30 years old. If we see it as IBM i on Power, we will use it like it is a modern platform. IBM i can do so much that AS/400 could not, yet much of the community is still using old technology, old techniques, old standards, and writing outdated applications. If the community were more aware of IBM i, and what it could do, our platform would have an improved reputation out in the community and in the industry at large. What a fabulous thing that would be.

The definition of legacy extends to whatever technology can be out-featured by a more popular solution. Unix trumped by Linux. IBM z mainframes trumped by Unix big iron, the kind that HP yearns to sell to find new HP-UX customers. Legacy is stable technology and cost-effective. But even a vendor of legacy tech like IBM wants those customers to advance their abilities by installing newer System i "legacy" releases.

This kind of advocacy is called championing at IBM. The vendor devotes a webpage to System i Champions, culled from the customer and consultant community. HP used to do this for 3000 users with its annual e3000 Contributor of the Year award (2006 winner Chris Koppe of Speedware, shown above), whose final recipient in 2008 was the entire customer community. But every one of those winners mounted the stage past 40 years of age. The System i user group COMMON sees a need to try to connect with younger IT pros -- but there's not much online evidence that it's finding the target.

IBM calls its younger turks the Young i Professionals. At a webpage dedicated to this mashup of recent IT graduates and younger-than-usual legacy managers, the youth movement is described.

The Young i Professionals are an international group of technology professionals that represent all “young” entrants into the job market or “young” users of IBM i, iSeries, System i, and AS/400. While already simple due to the nature of the system, we want to help make the process of learning the both basic and advanced topics of IBM i administration, development and management a little more accessible.

The lack of a youth movement in legacy systems is one of the biggest springboards for renovation and replacement of computers like the HP 3000 and the System i. Somehow, at a vendor just as serious as HP about serving the enteprise, IBM is at least paying webpage-service to the concept of grooming a new generation. Reading lips for IBM's System i, however, has become a practice as common as handicapping MPE system improvements during the late '90s and early Oughts -- a period when HP was still awarding prizes for 3000 system advocacy.

Migration Toward Futures, Staying or Going

After 25 years serving 3000 customer needs and expansions, MB Foster became an HP Platinum Migration Partner right out of the box a decade ago. It arrived amid the fresh chaos of that 2002 springtime along with Speedware, MBS and Lund Performance Solutions, and only Speedware remains in the 3000 business among those three cohorts. As his company celebrates 35 years in the 3000 market this spring, we asked founder Birket Foster about the start of the migration era. He notes that hundreds of customers remain as devoted to the 3000 as they ever were.

When did the migrations start in earnest?

    People started getting serious in 2006. But we still have customers that are running on an HP 3000 today, hundreds of them. They're doing what they need to do to stay where they are. I was talking to one yesterday running a very big contracting business. They were just getting their SAP live and now realizing they have to decommission their 3000. People get their replacement application but forget they have regulatory reasons to keep their data around.

    It's really important that people think these things through before they start migrations, because they can do things during the migration that will simplify things during the decommissioning process.

What are the latest prospects, from the perspective of a company working 35 years in this market, for the long-term HP 3000 user?

    We're just in the beginning of setting things up at MB Foster to work with Stromasys, benchmarking the access of our ODBC and JDBC access to data. We're making sure our UDA product line will run in the Stromasys 3000 emulator environment. That environment was cleared by a little side project I did as a volunteer: helping the 3000 world deal with Hewlett-Packard from an advocacy point of view. OpenMPE was something I chaired, after being recruited by John Marrah of Amisys.

   We've had tremendous people there at OpenMPE to carry the ball and make things happen, like Tracy Johnson making the Invent3k server happen. We ran an emulator project in conjunction with HP. The OpenMPE folks did the work to make sure there was a license transfer process in place for that. Making that legal has been a huge element in the potential for the emulator market.

A little while ago, in addition to your ventures in Storm.ca wireless Internet and Canada's Stay at Home assisted living services, you got more involved with a local restaurant to help out a friend. What new tricks has that taught you that can apply, 35 years later, to the HP 3000 market?
    Two years ago I got into an investment for a friend who wanted to run a restaurant.  I put a management team in place in 2011. When I got more involved to try to recoup some of my investment, it taught me some technologies that I'd had no exposure to. When you have a 240-seat license, you need to fill the room. So I learned a lot more about Facebook to put up a page for the Kemptville Pub to drive events. Once Facebook users Like us, they automatically get messages that tell them about us.
    From that Facebook piece I'm applying what I learned back to MB Foster. We've done our first page for MB Foster Associates. Not so much because people buy from that page, but it's a good placeholder - if they're buying our Windows scheduler, they'll find us on Facebook. It's a different twist from the days when you'd go to visit people in person, back in 1977.

Marking History with a Link to 3000 Futures

On the 35th anniversary of MB Foster’s entry to your market this spring, we wanted to ask its founder Birket Foster about how your group grew experience and connections. The old warning that braced conversations in the 1970s was “don't trust anyone over 30.” It's probably flipped over for the advice to 3000 customers today, since the over-30s have the best set of resources and reminders of how to move into a confident future. Much of his research is gathered in classic style, in person, wearing conference badges like the one shown at right.

Foster's MB Foster Associates was one of the first to deliver an alternative information stream for 3000 solutions, creating a catalog of MPE applications and tools. That one was a good enough idea to prompt HP to copy the catalog concept in those days when a thick book of HP and third-party apps was part of a 3000 manager's toolset. Foster moved right on to the next solution, whether it was selling millions of dollars of 3000 connectivity software, or building an ODBC engine robust enough for HP to ship inside MPE/iX, or becoming one of the first Migration partners after HP made its 2001 exit announcement. Lately the company has added a Windows scheduler and even more database access through its UDA Link lineup.

How did you enter this community back in those very different days of 1977?

    I'm just out of undergraduate school and I'm in charge of getting the next computing jobs for a team of us. I decide I'm should start a company to do this, so I talk to my law professor and he says he could give me part of my grade for my second year law class for just opening a company. I took the theory and turned it into practice. At the time I'd taken income tax law. I could deduct the $400 worth of textbooks and reference books I'd purchased to build a random number generator that would support benchmarking software -- written in COBOL and platform-neutral -- we were building.

Platform-neutral suggests a lot of server vendors, right?

    In addition to HP, I'd worked on Burroughs, IBM, DEC and even a Xerox Sigma system. So I'd written things in FORTRAN, BASIC, assembler and COBOL. When people would put a problem in front of me, I had to pull a team together to solve it. In the 1977 ecosystem there were a lot of different languages available. Every manufacturer had its own proprietary stuff. I had an assignment to train government DP staff to use terminals instead of punching card decks.

    Terminals were just terminals, grey screens. Lots of line printers around. I liked terminals with big memories, so you could actually scroll back a lot of pages. At that time the default terminal memory had two pages in it. Disk space was really expensive then: 120MB was $60,000.

    People had service bureaus. I worked with one for one of my customers. The reason we were there was because the 3000 was so expensive. Now the reason people are looking at cloud, the new service bureaus, is because the people are so expensive.

PCs were not an accepted part of business server strategy when you started. How did you get in on the start of that?

We've been fortunate to be in the right place at the right time a number of times over 35 years. We were helping customers out with some pretty big problems, like integrating PCs with their 3000s. We sold millions of dollars of WRQ's Reflection that way. This helped automate processes that went between the 3000 and the desktops. That led to us working with David Dummer, using his DataExpress, to move that product into working on spreadsheet formats. We sold DataExpress starting in 1985, and by 1989 we made him an offer and ended up owning the product, with David working on it from an office in Seattle. DataExpress gave us worldwide customers, which was another thing we'd been working on.

At least once a year you travel to Texas to visit customers and colleagues. What's that about, since MB Foster's Southern Ontario HQ is so far away?

    When I started in this market it was before the Internet. You couldn't look anything up. You had to know somebody, get ahold of them and find out what they were doing. I had a huge advantage because I traveled a lot starting in 1979. I got exposed to the Quiz report writer in the earliest days, before it became Quiz. I sold [Cognos'] Quiz before Quick and QTP existed. I got to see people all over my district of Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma and New Mexico. I met people as a result of coming out to speak at regional users groups. People didn't feel the need to call each other. They just got together once a month to talk about a topic. I did the initial deal for [MANMAN creators] ASK Computing. As a result of that, at one point 25 percent of all HP 3000s were using Quiz as a report writer.

But those reports remained on the HP 3000. How did they make the transition to being PC tools accessed easily by end users?

    We did some work inside the 3000 to do what we were calling Host Initiated File Transfer. We worked with Doug Walker of WRQ to have the PCs put themselves in receive mode to get handed a file, mostly spreadsheets at the time. We'd figured out how to download things to PCs by 1989, so I was teaching classes in Reflection. We were helping people put PCs on a desk instead of a terminal.

    As more PCs showed up, people wanted these 3000 numbers in a spreadsheet so the finance people could look up stuff. Although DataExpress ended up with 33 formats it supported for data extraction, in the beginning it was things like Lotus 1-2-3, VisiCalc and Word Perfect mail-merge files. Now that the product is UDA Link, we've just added MySQL, Postgres, Cache, Ingres and Progress databases, plus those already supported.

How about the MB Foster database work with HP on IMAGE?

    We got a contract with HP from 1996-2006 to supply the ODBC middleware for IMAGE/SQL, included software people remember as ODBCLink/SE. It was supposed to be called ODBCLink Jr. but somebody in HP marketing decided that wasn't a good idea, so they changed it to Special Edition.

    In 1999 we got involved in a project for a Large Midwestern-Based Insurance Company. Our job was to connect 80 HP 3000s with 8,000 Windows servers. We had to write code called XA Compliant Two-Phase commit to do this. It gave us a lot of experience in cross-database access and understanding deeply how SQL Server worked. We could melt down Microsoft's OS before our middleware driver would fail. It gave us experience in cross-platform databases, the next stage in the 3000's life.

And that would be HP's plans to exit this 3000 market?

    HP announced in 2001 that the 3000 would fade to black in a mere five years. Ha-ha-ha. It made it to 2010 before it went away at HP.

Vision from the past predicts 3000 futures

A span of 35 years is pretty much all of the HP 3000's useful lifetime. Birket Foster's company has lived and thrived on the stage of your 3000 community for 35 years this spring, stretching back to the days when his custom-written programs had to reside in a space of less than 8 kilobytes and exchanging information about 3000s was best done in person at a user group meeting.  

   It's not all just looking backward after 35 years with Foster. When we last interviewed him in 2009, he made predictions about the state of the 3000 community in 2012. He gave a forthright review of how those turned out, including those that could be judged either way. 

   We spoke with Birket -- a first-name fellow who we consider one of the best hubs for 3000 data -- just before Superbowl Weekend started. A few community veterans have a saying about him. “He was the Internet before there was an Internet. And he's still the Internet.” We like to stay online, and believe you'll benefit from his connections, too, whether it's links to a 3000 foundation, or connecting the dots for the future.

Let's look over your three-year-old predictions for this year. How'd you do on who remains in the market? You said maybe 10 percent of the original installed base is left.

   There's still hundreds of machines out there. There might even be low thousands.

You believed PCI credit card security would be an issue in getting migrations underway.

    PCI has been an issue with some customers. Some have worked it out by installing a PC between the 3000 and all those PCI requirements, and the PC manages it properly for them.
HIPAA regulations were going to be a factor in migrations, you believed.

    More and more people are moving to packaged software there, because the cost of administering healthcare is now being regulated by the amount of funding people get from the government. The government won't give them the money if the administration cost is too high, and the 3000 packages won't necessarily meet that.

And your prediction of the difficulty of getting 3000 IT professionals?

    It's still harder to get an HP 3000 programmer. Have you tried to find one lately? I know where to find them, but if you were just putting an ad in the local paper, I don't think you'd get as many resumes as you'd get for a Windows, .NET, Java or Linux programmer. For the people who thought they'd cut the expensive programmer positions and leave the operators, even their operators are retiring. They don't even call them operators now; they're sysadmins. But without a programmer you can't make any changes. That means if your business evolves, you're stuck.

You believed there would mostly be small companies using the 3000 by now.

    The big guys haven't all moved. But I was told by one company we're dealing with, “Our SAP team, which is replacing all the apps around the world, has us scheduled for this year.” There are some large customers who know they're a merger and acquisition candidate, so they're not going to mess with migration right now.

You were predicting a real embrace of what we call cloud services, and hardware would be becoming irrelevant.

It's no different than any other invention. It started with service bureaus, moved to Application Service Providers which failed, so then we called it Software as a Service, which kind of set some stages that would allow cloud to happen. It's only different because you have much higher speed Internet. People from 1977, when we started business, would think they had unlimited resources. You can roll your own machine, on Amazon or other places on the fly. You can say you want this much memory, this many CPUs, running this OS and these databases. This machine is built and ready to go in 20 minutes now, all virtual.

Do you care what hardware it's on? Hardware is not relevant. The application is the thing that's relevant.

Timely recovery can be no mean feat

By Birket Foster

MTTRO is not just an acronym. For years people have thrown around the acronym MTBF -- mean time between failures. This is how long before things fail, which is not really what people need to know. Once things have failed the challenge is to get them back online. In your personal life it could be an appliance like a washer or dryer or a furnace or air conditioning unit -- all of these are readily repaired. There are some interconnections that need to be considered, but the people in the business know all about the choices that are available. They can have a new device hooked up in hours.

Do you have a plan for getting things back online if your HP computer system fails? What is the impact on the organization? What does it cost your organization to have the computer system unavailable? What is the plan to get things back on line? You want to know long will it take, and what the costs will be for your organization while you get things back up and running.

MTTRO stands for Mean Time to Recovery of Operation. It deals with how long it would take to have your operations back online. Knowing the best case and worst case recovery times from different kinds of disasters will help put bounds around the how much will it cost your company to be down.

As an example, if your computer system fails on a Friday night before the backup is complete, you must know the steps to diagnose the problem -- and then there's a plan for recovery from different kinds of failure. How will you know what data is impacted? In the worst case maybe it's just this week's, or just today's transactions. What will it take to know what is missing and how will you recover the data -- can it be re-keyed? Was it from a website and it's gone? You'll want to log those website transactions so you can recover.

In a Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery Plan, the details of plans from different kinds of failures should be spelled out. This will make things easier than building a recovery plan on the fly.

Once you have the general disaster (or failure) and subsequent recovery scenarios scoped out, you can look at the costs of each scenario, the business processes impacted, and decide if there are steps to take to mitigate the risks. This makes the recovery plan a driver for business decisions, regarding investment to mitigate risk. It becomes a cost vs. benefit item

Take a look at your plans and make sure they have been updated for the latest methods of doing business. A backhoe severing a fiber optic cable can cause service outages that last for days. With everything interconnected this could impact VOIP telephony, web interfaces to applications, IT processes for inter-company transactions and more. Understand how the different stakeholders will be impacted: customers, employees, suppliers, and business partners.

If you know what might happen, you can plan the recovery. That will make it less expensive because your team will have a plan to follow with a known cost -- and you can calculate the cost of MTTRO.

Birket Foster is founder and CEO of MB Foster, an HP 3000 Platinum Migration partner and provider of the UDA line of connectivity software.

A Rare Birthday for Eugene Today

He was once the youngest official member of the 3000 community. And he still has the rare distinction of not being in his 50s or 60s while knowing MPE. Eugene Volokh celebrates his 44th birthday today, and the co-creator of MPEX must wait every four years to celebrate on his real day of birth: He was born on Feb. 29 in the Ukraine.

Although he's not the youngest community member (that rank goes to The Support Group's president David Floyd, a decade younger) Eugene probably ranks as the best-known outside our humble neighborhood. After he built and then improved MPEX, VEAudit/3000 and Security/3000 with his father Vladimir at VEsoft, Eugene earned a law degree as he went on to clerk for US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor -- en route to his current place in the public eye as go-to man for all questions concerning intellectual property on the Web and Internet, as well as First and Second Amendment issues across all media. He's appeared on TV, been quoted in the likes of the Wall Street Journal, plus penned columns for that publication, the New York Times, as well as Harvard, Yale and Georgetown law reviews. You can also hear him on National Public Radio. When I last heard Eugene's voice, he was commenting in the middle of a This American Life broadcast in 2010. He's a professor of Constitutional law at UCLA, and the father of two sons of his own by now. Online, he makes appearances on The Volokh Conspiracy blog he founded with brother Sasha (also a law professor, at Emory University).

In the 3000 world, Eugene's star burned with distinction when he was only a teenager. I first met him in Orlando at the annual Interex conference in 1988, when he held court at a dinner at the tender age of 20. I was a lad of 31 and listened to him wax on subjects surrounding security -- a natural topic for someone who presented the paper Burn Before Reading, which remains a vital text even more 25 years after it was written. The paper's inception matches with mine in the community -- we both entered in 1984. But Eugene, one of those first-name-only 3000 personalities like Alfredo or Birket (Rego and Foster, if you're just coming to this world), was always way ahead of me in 3000 lore and learning.

Burn Before Reading is part of a collection of Eugene's Thoughts and Discourses on HP 3000 Software, published by VEsoft long before indie publishing was so much in vogue. (We've got copies of the 4th Edition of book here at the NewsWire we can share, if you don't have one in your library. Email me.) The book even had the foresight to include advertisements from other members of the 3000 indie software vendor ranks. His father reminded me this month that the Russian tradition of Samizdat was a self-publishing adventure born out of the need to escape USSR censorship. These Russians created an enterprise out of the opportunities America and HP provided in the 1970s, when they emigrated.

Eugene got that early start as a voice for the HP 3000 building software, but his career included a temporary job in Hewlett-Packard's MPE labs at age 14. According to his Wikipedia page

At age 12, he began working as a computer programmer. Three years later, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Math and Computer Science from UCLA. As a junior at UCLA, he earned $480 a week as a programmer for 20th Century Fox. During this period, his achievements were featured in an episode of OMNI: The New Frontier.

His father Vladimir remains an icon of the 3000 community who's still on the go in the US, traveling to visit some of the 1,700 VEsoft customers to consult on securing and exploiting the powers of MPE. The Volokh gift is for languages -- Vladimir speaks five, and Sasha once gave a paper in two languages at a conference, before and then after lunch. I expect that this entry will be eagerly proofed and then corrected by Vladimir, just as he's provided insight and corrections for the next edition of my new novel Viral Times. It's a sure bet that Thoughts and Discourses will remain a useful tool at least as long as Viral Times stays in print. (I've got copies of Viral Times I can ship, too -- but that's an offer unrelated to the 3000's history.)

At 37,000 words, a single Q&A article from Eugene -- not included in the book -- called Winning at MPE is about half as big as your average novel. The papers in Thoughts and Discourses, as well as Winning, are included on each product tape that VEsoft ships. But if you're not a customer, you can read them on the Adager website. They're great training on the nuances of this computer you're probably relying upon, nearly three decades after they were written. Happy Birthday, young man. Long may your exacting and entertaining words wave.

Alternative Takes on HP Q1: Hope's on Tap

Yes, HP has reported Q1 results with sales down and profits eroded. It's true, the CEO has said the company has a long way to go to fix what's broken in the business. And oh yeah, the stock market stripped off about 5-10 percent of the HPQ share price after Meg Whitman spoke up.

But not all of that is spooking everybody about HP's futures for the next several years. It seems that the next few years will cover the period when migrations wind down, although I'm always surprised when a large corporation shows up on the homesteader roster. (Pfizer has been the latest homesteader, at least through 2010.)

Over in Good Morning Silicon Valley (siliconvalley.com), a Q1 reaction story notes that some analysts think HP's got a comeback saga that's being overlooked. If nothing else, Whitman said yesterday that she'll be at HP long enough to see that comeback through. If the board doesn't tire of her, we suppose. The GSVM story on the stock and comeback says

Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu, in a note to clients Thursday morning, said that the key element in HP's earnings report was the victory in EPS, "showing the company is making progress. The company is an underappreciated turnaround story (which could improve) as investors get more comfortable with the company's improved focus and execution."

There's no ignoring the numbers that show Itanium BCS sales are tanking (watch out, Unix migrators). But the HP overall forecast may be a five-year renovation, one that finds enough cost savings to stock up the R&D armory once more. R&D used to be one of HP's most potent weapons. And since the company wants to build a hardened Linux for HP-UX migrators, better R&D spending can only help provide that future.

Website reveals HP Discover 2012 sessions

HP and the user group Connect announced the opening of registrations for the world's largest annual Hewlett-Packard conference and expo. HP Discover 2012 is scheduled for the first week of June in Las Vegas. The meeting revolves around all things enterprise and HP, so it can be a mecca for migration training and information, and some instruction.

Connect and HP have improved a customer's ability to scout the schedule for the three days of talks and training. A search engine helps to discover sessions that are organized by tracks, subtracks, customer challenges addressed -- even type of presenter. That last search element yields a surprise today.

"At HP Discover we will have sessions presented by people with a variety of different backgrounds: Analysts, Customers/Clients, HP Employees, Partners and Sponsors," the website explains.

A total of five sessions are listed as being presented by customers or clients. Three talks on using and supporting cloud computing, plus one each on "an effective IT support contract" to minimize downtime, as well as IT energy management. Even back in the days six conferences ago in 2005, the content of the conference as well as attendance wore a heavy HP coat. The vendor is giving its partners even fewer chances for partners to engage customers in talks, too. A total of four pop up in today's Discover search engine. No talks are scheduled from analysts or sponsors.

I'd never again suggest that HP has too large a presence at a conference now called HP Discover. And some of the best technical sessions I've ever seen at an IT conference have been delivered by HP engineers right out of the labs. Mark Bixby is the first software engineer who comes to mind, giving a presentation on how to make great use of Perl on the HP 3000. (Yup, that's a PowerPoint slide link.)

But Bixby arrived in HP's labs after years of administering a customer site in a California college system. You don't need customer experience to deliver a meaningful and instructive session. But it helps to know what it's like to sit in the audience, wondering what you can take back to the jobsite to show value for the travel expenses.

In my experience sitting alongside those managers, the in-person bonus of hearing any talk live is the interaction that happens at the end. Questions and answers are much harder to share over a webpage. There are 165 HP sessions on the HP Discover schedule of 2012. A session like BB2125, "We know how much your applications cost to run. Do you?" -- that's got a sort of teach-y tone to it. Maybe the questions at the end will deliver some less-practiced but fully-useful answers.

You might want to schedule a healthy slice of time for the vendor expo area to create an interactive experience at HP Discover. There are some interesting gems among what the HP organizers describe as an 800-session conference. The abstract for "BYOD (Bring your own Device) – how to meet demands for streamlined client virtualization implementation" reads

In this session you will learn the trends in client virtualization, the architectures to consider, new solutions and services that you can leverage to reduce the complexity of planning, architecting and supporting client virtualization. We will cover organizational and technical considerations as well as best practices to reduce the time from architecture to deployment by 50 percent or more.

The conference has an official feel to its registration today. Policies on refunds are explicit so there's no confusion. But I don't recall language that reminds a manager HP can cancel a registration to a conference, even if it's had HP in the name of the show.

No HP Discover 2012 registration cancellations will be processed after 15 May, 2012. User Group memberships are not refundable. HP reserves the right to cancel an attendee's registration, conference price paid will be fully refunded.

It's $1,795 to attend HP Discover 2012 as an individual, but the Connect user group rate is $1,495. The price includes "all general sessions, breakout sessions, hands-on labs,certification testing, HP Discover Zone, track keynotes, one-to-one meetings with HP experts, demos, scheduled meals, conference receptions, and evening entertainment." Registration is active online today.

Virtual futures await for early 3000 readers

NewsWire Editorial

    A dream delayed is better than a dream denied. It's a natural element of being human to look into the future, a skill your community has polished over the last decade. Across the same period I've done polishing of my own on a dream that looked denied, but has escaped its delays.

    It's Viral Times, the novel I began to write in earnest once HP stopped writing its futures for the 3000. This month the book is a reality in printed and ebook versions, available at Amazon.com and signed from my Writer's Workshop website, workshopwriter.com. I think of Viral Times as my 3000 emulator. It's a project devised from a sense of necessity, given up for lost at least once, but revived and delivered after a surprising amount of challenges in its creation.

   I'd also like to believe my novel has fans waiting in their seats to experience its magic. Not a bestseller's number of readers, partly because a wide-scale release is no more likely than the prospects for the Stromasys Charon HPA/3000 to reverse the trends of 3000 ownership. But you don't need to be a bestseller to tell a good story with meaning for the future. On the other hand, if you don't tell a good story, there's only a slim chance to become a bestseller. Of small books and modest software projects come enduring classics, if we're patient and lucky.

    There's been plenty of time to practice patience with the emulator. It was first discussed in the fall of 2002, the same time I started my training as a writer of fiction with classes at the Austin Writer's League. The concepts of both these ventures have changed a great deal, just like the fields where they're appearing. The '02 emulator was heading for a specialized hardware design that could mimic PA-RISC processors. Software would be essential, but at one point the leading vendor was looking for PA-RISC chips to be placed in a PC-slot card.

    Viral Times started off in a very different place, too. This story of a star reporter who's disgraced and must redeem himself and recover love in a pandemic opened in 2044. I thought I needed that much elbow room in the future to show a society locked down into virtualized life, even virtualized love to avoid disease. It now starts in 2020. By the time it went into release this month, my shorthand for the tale was "It's a story in a future closer than you think."

   In the emulator's tale, the marketplace believed it needed a 3000 replacement right away to stem the departure of customers from the platform. Anything that would arrive later than HP's exit would be meaningless. The reality of the 3000's future was a more interesting story.  It turned out to be a tale of preserving MPE, not the hardware and software we've come to call the HP 3000.

   Nothing was ever going to reverse the outflow of 3000 customers from this community. Too much change took place as a result of the dot-com Web boom to give vendor-locked computing much of a growth path. For business computing, an open model fed by many allied independent players is the only way to grow. Within the last four years, this kind of virtualized community, working with open specifications, is spinning the story of the future of computing. And storytelling, too. The changes don't signal the end of other kinds of computing, though — not any more than the rise of ebooks means the demise of paperbacks.

    Even through Viral Times will enjoy a long life as an ebook — it will never go out of print — it's also getting a loving debut as a story printed with ink on paper. I've published it using everything the 3000 community has given me the chance to polish: deadlines and printer double-checks, research and feedback (we call that last one "workshopping" in the fiction business). We used to call such books "self-published," a lot like the 3000 market used to call most of its products "third-party."

    But independence from strategies of the past is driving both books and computers. Looking to the future provides the great spark of "what if." HP once enjoyed the same phrase when it first introduced a touchscreen computer, a 9-inch marvel of the MS-DOS heyday, too far ahead of its time.

    Viral Times needed eight years of planning and work (and another half-dozen of dreaming) to become a book I can sign and send to readers. There's the ebook version to download to an e-reader like an Amazon or Apple tablet, yes — but just try signing that one. The act of a human hand pushing ink across paper is one of those pleasures we continue to enjoy. I enjoyed signing at a little release party here in Austin. People enjoyed seeing a writer at work, jotting down personal messages above a signature.

   Your community's emulator needed futuristic changes in its strategy to become a reality, too. Virtualization grew stronger, like a chapter revised and edited, until it became a keystone to extending computing into any budget or set of human resources. The IT datacenter with a troop of white coats has become virtualized, so ethereal it's called the cloud. We used to work with service bureaus because the computers were so expensive. Now we use the cloud because people are so expensive.

   And yet we can't dream of a time when we don't need people to manage computing, not any more than I could dream of a story where love wasn't the most important part of staying healthy in a future filled with danger. What I didn't see coming, but wished for, was virtualizing the publishing field. People tell stories that can be read without a wall of paper to prove their worth. Self-publishing, the old vanity press, has become indie publishing thanks to e-reader technology people slagged — just like emulation — for many years.

    What both the Stromasys emulator and my Viral Times need now are reviews. People need to try out the future to see how it fits them and report back. Take a ride on the indie express, and see if there's joy for you in its future.

Vendors mull emulator tool, app licenses

Even while we await the announcement of the first installation of the Stromasys Charon HPA/3000 emulator product, we're even more eager to get updates on related software. Third party software -- we like to call it independent products now, since HP's stepped away from the party -- still needs a model to license the use of tools and applications.

By many estimates, four out of five HP 3000s in the homestead world are running their own in-house packages. Or they're using commercial vendor software that's modified so heavily it may as well be a custom system. There are licenses of MANMAN from Infor to consider, as well as the remaining installations of Ecometry and a few others. But it's a rare thing for a company to be charging a support fee for an application on a 3000.

Surround code, and third party tools, are a very different territory. Products like UDA Link from MB Foster, Speedware and PowerHouse, Robelle's Suprtool and Qedit, VEsoft's MPEX, even a bedrock tool like Adager -- all are vital parts of the 3000 community that must mull over how their licenses on the HPA/3000 should work. The tool providers usually sustain themselves with annual support contracts, but some have used license transfers while products were moved from older to newer HP 3000s. Several of those vendors have tested their products against HPA/3000 for compatibility.

One such vendor is MB Foster. When we checked in recently with founder Birket Foster -- a Q&A with him is coming in our printed February issue -- he mentioned licensing for emulation as an issue that was resolved by HP, but is still in play at independent software vendors.

"What do you do about software licensing for all of the vendors out there?" he asked during our hour-plus interview. Foster was not only involved in getting the terms on HP's MPE/iX emulator license hammered out in work with OpenMPE. His work goes back to the days when indie software vendors, then called ISVs, gathered in a Special Interest Group he chaired for Interex, SIGSOFTVEND. HP worked through that group to ensure tool makers and app vendors had early tech access to fresh MPE/iX releases.

In the face of a new system model where Stromasys will be selling a USB key, equipped with a valid HPSUSAN number for a replaced 3000, "We still have to charge for all of this," Foster said. "We still have hundreds of customers running our UDA series products on the HP 3000." As development continues on the products -- both for new platforms like Unix and Linux as well as 3000s -- "we have to pay people to do that work, and they in turn pay on their mortgages, their kids going to school and more. We still have to charge for this to keep the engineering in place."

"That's a concern for all of the vendors as they walk into an environment where they'll be on an emulated HP 3000," he adds. "It's not going to be free. But I think most vendors realize that it's got to be reasonable."

3000 group links up to LinkedIn job advice

Editor's Note: The 3000 Newswire has become the official publication of the CAMUS user group, a service we're happy to perform for these MRP and ERP sites which use the classic MANMAN application. Michael Anderson, a board director of the group, asked us to pass along these tips from the group's last meeting -- advice on how to make LinkedIn work best for you. Anderson says, "As our systems migrate to new platforms, so do our associates and coworkers migrate to new jobs.  The easiest time to build up your professional network is while you're working on a migration project."

We like LinkedIn as the Facebook for the professional set; there's an HP 3000 Community Group on LinkedIn that's got more than 420 members, ready to network with you on jobs and share advice. The article below was written for the group by Linda Tuerk, executive director of siliconvalleysearch.com. Tuerk notes that adding groups (like that 3000 Group) helps you rise up in the LinkedIn searches.

Your goal is to keep up with your professional friends quickly and easily. LinkedIn can do this.

Your goal is to have a modern version of the business card; you want to appear professional and up to date when clients look you up prior to an appointment, meeting, conference call, or interview. LinkedIn can do this, too.

Your goal, if you're job seeking, is to show up in the first 100 profiles when someone is searching for someone like you. The real goal is to be in the first 10, since that is all that shows per page. Shallow profiles rarely get found. Deep public profiles are searchable on Google/Bing. And internal corporate recruiters and execs are looking for you too. The following are the steps you can take on LinkedIn to raise these odds.

1. Use LinkedIn for interview preparation and business prospects. In a "people" search, type the name of the company; all the employees will come up that are in your network within three levels of separation. You might have to pay LinkedIn $20-80 to see all the names and full profiles. It's probably worth it. You can always do it for just a month.

2. Wordsmith your Headline, Summary, and Specialties sections. They all have maximum allowed spaces. Play with them. Use keywords and titles to describe yourself. Review position descriptions and ads of jobs you want, and pepper your profile with the most frequent, relevant, and desirable. Review peer profiles. For more on this subject, see booleanblackbelt.com and befoundjobs.com. You can also use wordcloud apps like wordle.net to create relevant word clouds.

3.  Turn off your LinkedIn member feed, profile and status updates from the settings page, found on the popdown menu under your name. Wait a few hours, maybe overnight. You may want to keep some of these off most of the time, depending on how much you want others to see who you are connecting with, etc.

4. There's a new section, Skills. These are pre-selected. You can have 50. These are very important as of late. Some say this section has surpassed keyword density in relevance.

5. Consider job seeking status on a monthly basis. Pro: You end up listed first. Con: You look desperate?

6. Link with as many as you can. Some experts say that you will only show up in search results for your skillset only 3 percent of the time if you are linked to fewer than 200 people. That incidence is supposed to climb to 90 percent if you are linked to "500+." Look for "Open Networkers" and LIONs that will link with everybody. Drop them later if you like.

7.  Add Groups related to your professional field. You are allowed 50. Concentrate on ones that have thousands of members at first. Add local ones that seem relevant and have at least 100. Check them out, and as you near your 50 Group maximum, drop some that are less relevant and add the most relevant for you. Most have jobs tabs. Link to Group members you like or that have 500+ connections. Find jobs on Discussion tabs also.

8. Check settings for your public profile. This is searchable by Google, Bing and Yahoo, and there is a huge recruiter subculture using Google strings.

9. Now, turn your privacy settings back to "broadcast mode." Consider whether you want your member feed showing, but you do want your status updates showing, and you might want to update your status 1-2 times per month.

10. Join discussions on your groups, follow the threads that seem to have good content. Comment where appropriate, get your name out there. This is a chance to impress. When you appear knowledgeable in your field, others will come forward and ask to be linked to you. Likewise, you will notice people that you like and can ask to link with or "follow." Check out group events, especially local networking opportunities.

11. Use a good basic headshot for your photo. It gets you three times the responses, compared to no headshot.

Managers report on mobile access to 3000s

Put a problem or a possibility in front of HP 3000 veterans and they will share what they know about solutions, usually on the 3000 newsgroup and mailing list. As we first noted last week, the problem of connecting the iPad or iPhone to a 3000 -- or the possibility of enabling this most mobile of clients -- sparked some tests and suggestions from your community.

"I've had a couple of requests from sales people wanting to log on to the HP 3000 to do lookups," said Randy Stanfield of Unisource. It's a company using the HP 3000 in support of its business selling printing materials such as papers, facility supplies and equipment, and packaging materials and equipment.

Telnet, as we noted yesterday, is the state of the art for apps to communicate with the 3000. A telnet client will most probably not know anything about HP escape sequences, so the app access will be nothing more than character-mode.

Consultant and security expert Art Bahrs reports he's found a couple of telnet emulators, and wondered if WRQ might have one that runs on iOS. Alas no, and WRQ became a part of Attachmate years ago. Its Reflection line still offers NS/VT and telnet links to 3000s. Attachmate has no iOS apps, a fact that's easy to confirm because the Apple App Store is the only source of apps that don't need a jailbroken phone or pad. Jailbreaking adds power and options to these devices, but deploying jailbroken iPads to a sales force is a strategy that can change a career.

Then Bahrs checked back in to report on zaTelnet v 3.3, from zaTelnet. Bahrs and other 3000 vets are running tests to see if an iOS device can manage a 3000, access that's a few steps short of user-grade interfaces to 3000 applications. 

Bahrs said that he was able to test the free version of the telnet iPad app zaTelnet. Many apps are free in this category, with a more fully-featured complement for a few dollars more. "It definitely would work for a quick and dirty trouble shooting session, or to check on a job, or support a user with an abortio or such," he said.

Security is another testing point. ZaTelnet is a SSH2 client for iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches. It  emulates terminal VT100 and partially xterm  -- enough for  console programs. ZaTelnet supports SSH2 authorization by plain password, interactive password and private key file.

"SSH is an option," Bahrs said of the secure shell handler on ZaTelnet, "and it did work successfully both ways. There are times that good old fashioned telnet really does come in handy when doing testing, so I test both."

Mocha Telnet, which we mentioned yesterday, gets the job done for 3000 management. "It works perfectly on my iPhone," said support provider Gilles Schipper, "even the Lite (free) version. I can even run HP Glance on it. While it doesn't look too pretty, one can decipher the output. I set the termtype to "hp," rather than the default "vt220."

3000 connections still Padding in the future

Not long ago, HP business server users started to ask about iPad connectivity once again. Some of the answers included pretty good advice on getting access to HP's Unix servers. The HP 3000 connectivity, which would be best served with 700/92 emulation nuances, might be a more complex prospect.

Back in the summer of 2010 we were waiting on the arrival of a 3000-grown solution. Minisoft intended to release its Javelin connection for iOS. It had even set a $9.95 price. But then the developer Neal Kazmi weathered some health issues and the project had to be tabled. But it's not canceled, according to Minisoft's founder and president Doug Greenup.

We were all set to do this with Neal and then had to pospone. He is back working on a number of projects here at Minisoft. The Javelin port to iPad is still on the "to do" list. I know there are people interested in a robust HP connectivity app for iPad. We just haven't had the development resources to finish the project.

So while we'll keep an eye on the App Store for the first 3000-savvy iOS app, there might be another solution available in the meantime. Something demoed on the Macworld show floor, just getting on its feet, can give users control over their desktop back at the office -- and so they'd be able to use a Windows PC running 3000 connectivity solutions, or even something hosted on the Mac.

Yes, there is one Mac-based 3000 terminal and connectivity solution. Minisoft sells a Mac-capable version of Javelin. You might have known this Minisoft software as MS/92 in an earlier life. The whole kit's been rewritten in Java, which makes the software capable of running on a wider range of clients, all to attach to servers including the 3000, Unix and even the AS/400 lineup. There's also a Minisoft Secure 92 solution with SSH tunneling that's been released recently.

But back to that desktop control solution. Splashtop Remote Desktop requires a wi-fi connection between the desktop and the tablet. It even supports Android devices. So you can use this app, plus a free Streamer client on that desktop, to control any interface you can drive from the desktop. There's one level of connectivity while inside the same wi-fi network. But Splashtop can also reach outside of a company's net for even greater remote range.

A connection through a working Gmail account lets the desktop certify itself to the iPad or Android tablet. Using this network, a worker in a secured wi-fi net in another location can touch the software on his desktop. I saw the on-the-same-net demonstration at Macworld and was surprised at the level of control. I don't know if I'd try this with an iPad 1, because more processing power is better. It will hum along even faster in a little while when the iPad 3 is released this spring.

There are three kinds of IT managers who respond to these mobile connection needs. The first wants to wall off IT from mobile access. The second is willing to see why mobile will make the enterprise better. The third knows that mobile is essential to keeping a company abreast of modern access. You don't want to be the first for very much longer. This is a wave that's not going to be stopped; it's a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) world out there now. Apple's sold 55 million iPads already, not to mention the 100 million iPhones. Android will bring even more devices into the shop. And there's usually a good chance they arrive under the arm or in the pocket of a VP who simply wants to use their favorite laptop replacement.

As for entrusting Google to certify a remote computer's indentity, it's better than nothing. Even the developers of Splashtop understand Gmail is a stopgap. But an internal wi-fi linkup is a great way to be responsive to a request for mobile 3000 access. The ultrabooks will make laptops lighter, but those are not the devices causing the BYOD wave. You can get ready for tablets now, and keep an eye on what else will emerge this year.

Macworld makes Apple work for business

The noteworthy Macworld Expo unfurled its computing charms this week, but the 27-year-old show about all things Apple has a nouveau business patina these days. Almost 75 percent of Apple's historic Q1 sales came off mobile products. It's a remarkable tally considering that was a $46 billion first quarter. Apple is not doing it on the backs of consumers exclusively. Business has embraced the Apple brand, not only in mobile but also on the enterprise's desktops.

It has been many years since a large conference included HP 3000 solutions. Not even the final HP World show of 2004 could be considered large by Macworld standards; Interex was doing very well when it drew 7,000 IT souls, and Macworld hovers near the 20,000 mark these days. A few hundred vendors make up the show floor this week, although it's thick with vendors of covers for any Apple product you can carry -- which if you take a moment to consider it becomes the bulk of the Apple line: ultra-slim laptops like the Macbook Air, beefier models like the Pro and the iPads and iPhones. All accomplished solutions, but there's a growing number of companies that want to out-do Windows desktops here, and I'm not talking about Angry Birds on Windows Phone or MS Office. You can look beyond the common-cloth Unix choices if you're making a migration and plan to buy off the shelf replacement software.

This year a new player entered this market with a software shell that makes Mac management as simple as administering Windows desktops. Mokafive integrates with those Mac systems so an admin with Windows experience -- Active Directory, that sort of thing -- can manage everything from a single screen. (That screen above is on a Macbook Air.)  After all, inside the heart of Apple's products beats Unix, the original "open" system that's supposed to connect with everything. Mokafive isn't the only way to convince your IT staff that Macs won't be any extra burden. There are other products aimed at creating a homongenous workplace for computers which tap corporate data.

Okay, full disclosure here: The companies I've worked for and founded since 1987 have been Apple shops. It used to be the domain of pariahs and the source of derisive snorts, but the Mac world has gone corporate on us all. The pro-sumer movement, where iPhones and iPads get carried into an enterprise by C-level officers, has brought along Macs as a sticky complement. In a report on the $46 billion quarter, Apple's CEO Tim Cook said nearly all of the Fortune 500 is using Apple's products, including most companies adopting Macs. It used to be that a localized in-house datacenter kept Apple out. Now there's cloud computing to take the place of an IMAGE/SQL, if you're departing the 3000 world. This cloudy future is helping to make Apple's business outlook brighter.

This being a computer conference, some things haven't changed a bit since 1987. More than one vendor had hired "booth babes" -- apologies to the female managers reading that phrase -- to attract attention to one software package or another. A gaggle of these working women simply reminded me of the aisles of Uniforum 25 years ago, where men wearing parrots on shoulders at that Unix show shared space with women who might be modeling when they weren't wearing mini-dresses festooned with booth numbers on their behinds. The  difference was that Macworld 2012's aisles and booths were rife with women working in more business-like garb, both buying as well as selling. One example was Mokafive's COO Purnima Padmanaban.

Padmanaban is clear-eyed about the hurdles the Mac faces in IT strategy. "Corporations have trouble adopting Macs because while Macs are beautiful and sleek, but Windows applications don't run on them, and it's very hard to secure a Mac," she said. "What we do is take your standard corporate Windows environment and make it a secure managed app on a Mac." Using a concept that Intel calls Intelligent Desktop virtualization, it means that the Mac takes an equal but familiar place on the console for corporate computing, with Windows losing none of its compatibility with the likes of SQL Server or even a 3000-savvy database like Eloquence for Windows. Mokafive provisions corporate Windows environments for the Mac desktops. You free your users to bring in that Macbook Air they want to use on the job.

Another way to embrace Windows work on Apple's products is through virtualization. While this doesn't provide much of a single-pane administration benefit, the likes of VMWare's Fusion or Parallels have advanced the cause of emulation. That's the vehicle that's carrying MPE into the future. Parallels can either present a Mac-like workspace on the desktop that's completely outfitted with Windows as well. Or it can give a user the Windows experience by day and let them revert to Mac OS X off the job. There's a lively competition between Fusion and Parallels that keeps each product improving at a constant rate. Both have gotten three major improvements in the last two years, and at $79 a desktop it's too inexpensive to trigger even 3000-grade budget shock.

Managing virtualization requires some learning, but it's a good skill set to acquire going into 2012. On the other hand, Padmanaban claimed that IT managers need "zero additional skills" to deploy and administer Mokafive's Player, "an app that is running my standard Windows desktops." She also says that deployment is possible in as little as 90 minutes. The software installation comes on a USB key.

As for the mobile goodies being displayed here, one software solution treats Windows as if it were running on iPads. Splashtop brings the Windows apps and desktops to the ultra-popular tablets by giving the user a remote control of their PCs. (Yes, that's the usually-reviled but necessary Explorer browser in the picture, running on an iPad that's controlling a PC remotely.) If an app can run on the PC, it can be used on an iPad. Because it's an iOS app, the cost is crazy-cheap. This week Splashtop is $2.99 per iPad, and the regular price is only $19.95. I watched a demo that showed a PC desktop running while the iPad gave cursor control, text entry, clicks on buttons -- any aspect of an interface required. It gets even better for remote use, because you can use it over a secured wi-fi environment from across the country. At the moment Google Mail somehow tells your desktop to talk to the remote app, since you sign in with a Gmail account on both iPad and PC. Google is far from perfect, but if its apps can be rolled out to the multi-billion dollar BBVA bank enterprise, it's probably capable of managing the handshake between an iPad and a Windows PC.

Windows and the PC world never cared much about adopting Apple support in the decades where Microsoft had all the mojo. Coming from a humble position in the business world, the Apple solutions have a "can't we all get along" approach. There are millions of Windows desktops out there. But there are now millions of Apple's mobile customers bringing along Macs, a market that showed 26 percent growth over the last year versus zero for the rest of the PC industry. Apple products are going to become a management mission for the IT department, driven along by mobile attachments. Although Apple never aimed at becoming an enterprise darling, the business has arrived anyway. It delivers an user experience that can mimic Windows, or something newer and smoother and yes, popular -- integrated with what you already are adopting for your migration.

Relying on a Product That's Market-Proof

The thunder you might have heard today came rumbling down from the stock market, where Apple's shares rose $35 in trading after the company's quarterly report. HP's tablet and PC competitor is nearing the point where it laps Hewlett-Packard in PC sales, so long as you call an iPad a personal computer. There's great evidence you can use one for lightweight mobile tasks. Apple sold more than 15 million iPads, more than 5 million Macs (mostly laptops) and posted $46.3 billion in sales -- in just 90 days including the holidays. Apple is on track to out-sell HP in total numbers for the last four quarters, by a big margin. And speaking of margins, the profits on that $46.3 billion were $13 billion.

If you've forgotten, because HP's numbers don't matter so much to you anymore, HP recorded just $130 billion in sales for its entire 2011 year. There's a message here that matters to a 3000 owner, during this day when Apple's stock rose by more than the full price of an HP share. Public-traded companies are going to chase profits and market share. That's one reason why the life of a 3000 owner is a simpler existence today.

HP had no compelling technical reason for exiting its 3000 business. It was a decision based on revenues, profits and growth of the business. Apple hasn't exited the iPod business, but the popular Touch line got no updates during 2011. Sounds a bit like the 3000's offerings after February 2001, when the A- and N-Class servers finally surfaced. The canary in the mineshaft, warning of a lack of oxygen -- that's a lack of updates. This is something to be expected out of any tech product sold by a public company.

Is it too crazy to believe that in the post-manufacturing era of the 3000, its stable and static future could be a refuge? It's not like there's going to be any less HP involvement with the 3000. The server is now being cared for by the community of its users. Hundreds and hundreds of experts. They don't have investors or any public-trading demands to impact their 3000 curation mission. It's all about the customers.

No, that's not a scenario that will spark fresh installations of HP 3000s. Many a migrating company uses the departure of HP as a spark for a system's exit. But some companies have cleared out all HP gear except for their 3000s. So if a migrating company is stuck on the server for awhile longer, at least surprises are going to be few in that environment. This server has become market-proof, at least stock-market-proof. The history that we recall is that the axe descended after the 3000's creator hired a leader who was directed to boost HP's valuation.

The public company that is HP has stepped away from many products other than 3000s. It's the nature of any company that's pursuing profits. Christian Lheureux, a veteran of the 3000 software and HP partner markets, said at the demise of the TouchPad -- a product with a single hardware-software-application chain -- that HP's only looking out for the future of its company.

If history is any lesson, let me note that any market where HP can't grab, say, a 30 percent share is abandoned, period. Remember the Photosmart cameras? Proprietary OS mini-computers like the HP 3000? Dot-matrix printers? HP TVs? Polyserve file clusters? With the TouchPad, they probably quickly realized they would never get 30 percent against the iPad, so they dumped it, full stop.

Remember, it's not at all about tech innovation, but all  about market share, actual or future. ROI. Earnings per share. Gross margin. Operating profit. You name it. That's the way companies are run these days, and, by the way, it's what keeps them in business. Anybody remember the seven pillars of the HP Way ? Number One was profit.

It's not that the 3000 community has no regard for profits. Suppliers and tech vendors need profits to keep things stable, so someone can answer a call who knows that a 3000 is not a printer and can fix code that's spitting errors unexpectedly. That's a rare thing for a server that hasn't had an OS change in four years.

While it might not seem possible to avoid public-traded companies' products, open source and commodity hardware give you a chance. Migrating to a different environment controlled by a share-trading vendor is just asking for long-term pain, according to James Byrne at Harte & Lyne Ltd.

Do not buy anything from any publicly traded, joint stock, company, that you plan to depend upon for the long term. Period.  The so-called efficiency of the market on the stock exchange amounts to a roulette wheel and companies that thereby choose to dance to the tune whistled by gamblers have no vision beyond that of the end of their own nose.  Instead, buy from private firms that have some idea of what it takes to stay in their own 'business' and are not beholden to speculators.

The accomplishment of HP's shareholders is that the last bits of HP gear at our firm were gone by the end of 2011 (with the sole exception of the HP 3000). And good riddance.

So in the glory days of HP's stock, when it was a $70 item from a company paying dividends, there was as much to celebrate as Apple's customers can revel in today. But somewhere out there in this decade an iPod will become a historic footnote at Apple, just like the 3000 did at HP. Unlike your server, you probably can't expect an aftermarket of community stewards to keep the iPods relevant and stable.

Iconic Kodak product may fade to hobbyists

Eastman Kodak's filing for bankruptancy yesterday signaled a transformation for an iconic inventor. The leader in film for more than 100 years, Kodak faces a new future this morning, one that will be tied to printing success. The company's been given until February 2013 to produce a reorganization plan, and it will try to get the sale of $2 billion in imaging patents approved by June 30. But Kodak's breakthrough of film won't go away, not any more than an MPE/iX environment will disappear. For Kodak, the expectation is that film imaging will retreat to hobbyist and enthusiast markets.

Like MPE/iX, film photos will become the standard by which successors are judged. And what's possible is the same fate of vinyl recordings: a modest renaissance as lifelong digital picture-takers consider the advantages of older technology. The same thing will be happening to paper books in the future. Companies without a plan for these newer complimentary technologies will suffer. Most of the 3000's customers are using at least a Windows server somewhere in their enterprise.

Kodak's inventions in film and imaging have become its last stronghold, a redoubt the company fell upon while trying to sell off its patent portfolio. The stock was pounded again today, shares which were de-listed from the NYSE in a stunning reversal for a company of its age and reputation. But that reputation is what's likely to leave Kodak's products in a spot where they'll survive well. A later-era entry like the company's pocket video cameras (above) which included novel features like mic inputs might have the same kind of aftermarket that the 3000 has enjoyed. When you build it well to start, the value remains even after the vendor has fled.

As an example of one beloved product's aftermarket, consider the Stereo Realist community. These are the acolytes of stereo photography, the technology that rose in the '50s and '60s until prints took over for slide film. These days you'd call it 3D, but that was not the term my father used when he'd show off his stereo slides on the projector in our basement.

But the old portable stereo slide viewers remain in great demand. A product that was sold for under $50 when it was introduced now sells for $200. Even in constant currency that's a remarkable retention of value.

HP 3000 value, both in hardware and software, is important to your community. Some of the most specialized resources rely on the continued value of this business solution. Unlike Kodak, your happy dovecoat of settled, harmonious owners won't be turning to a highly competitive sales plan. Many suppliers have experienced a stall in growth when making that leap. We'd like to believe in the wake of the Kodak collapse that well-engineered products have a limitless lifespan. The 3000 still has enthusaists who know there's no substitute for the extra dimension of the server.

 

 

What becomes legacy: everything eventually

What can you do about it? Embrace the virtualized future for any platform you use, or migrate onto. It's the only way to keep the business of the old republic vital.

When Stromasys showed off its first test runs of the HPA/3000 Charon emulator, the company pointed out that the market for virtualization is only getting larger. Some companies have retained environments no longer supported by the vendor. While HP comes to mind here, this is also true of Microsoft. Some people are surprised when they learn MPE/iX drives manufacturing companies as large as Measurement Specialties. That's only a few dozen servers, however. We've heard of one organization that has more than 3,000 Windows NT systems to support.

That story comes from Robert Boers, the CTO of Stromasys who makes a compelling case for virtualization of all environments, whether a dated Windows release or the classic MPE/iX. "The industry is looking away from a growing problem of legacy systems," he said, "one that's got nothing to do with HP or VAX and Alpha servers." Stromasys has sold more than 4,000 installations of those DEC systems, developing a business model and tech design they're applying to HPA/3000. He cited a military organization "who have 3,500 Windows NT 4 servers. They can't run that stuff anymore on a modern [hardware] platform."

While Boers said this legacy wave has little to do with the HP 3000 opportunity, the issues remain the same. Everything which IT purchases has an end-of-life date coming from the vendor. Once that day arrives the IT customer can choose to go independent. But at some point a PA-RISC system like the 3000 or old HP 9000s, or the Itanium servers hosting HP-UX, it all becomes a legacy system -- even the relatively nouveau platform of Windows NT. All of these computers host business critical applications. Boers said the average lifespan of such an app is now 22.5 years. It's not tough to find in-house software that was created more than 20 years ago in your community. What's become harder to do is find gear to keep it running which has room to grow in performance and connectivity.

"There's still more and more legacy systems around," Boers said.  "if you look at the growth of thge worldwide installed base of computers, there's a very interesting period between 1980 and 1990. The worldwide installed base multiplied by a factor of 22 times. The IT installed base kept growing, but it has never hit a factor of 22 in any single decade since then."

"If you combine the two numbers -- 20-30 years of application life, and a growth of 22 times -- over the next decade we will see an unusually large number of business applications which are clearly at the end of life. It's accentuated by the growth bubble of the 80s. It's the equivalent of the post-WW II birth rate." IT managers put the HP 3000 on the map as a popular enterprise destination during that decade. Unix wasn't an option and Windows didn't exist in a practical release.

Whether you homestead or migrate into the future, this baby boom of IT will impact your plans. "We're going into a decade where there will be an extreme need for replacing something to keep these applications running, or find a more efficient way of replacing them. There is not enough time and money in the world or not enough people to rewrite the applications or put them into SAP. This symbolizes there have to be other things to be done with legacy applications."

"We simply can't cope with them over the next 10 years. And very few people know that, because the average of the computer salesman is less than the time when these [legacy] machines were created. They don't know about them, they don't like them -- and they have no clue how important these machines are."

Boers waxes philosophical about the situation once he starts talking about caring for legacy technology. "In the last 200 years or so, every time something was really needed in society to keep it moving, it was invented," he said. "Sometimes multiple people invented multiple things in different places in the world." At this point I think about the wave of minicomputers built in the 1980s from Wang, DEC, Data General, NCR, Burroughs, Sun, HP, IBM and so many more. So many have seen the end of their vendor life. Some of those are supported in virtualization, even today.

Boers said he believes that if the IT industry is maturing -- "which I hope it does, it will come up with newer technologies to deal with this growing problem of legacy software. I'll be less modest: one of the things we at Stromasys have invented is a little bit of that newer technology." The IT industry needs to spend more time helping customers with such dilemmas, he added.

The legacy market will be getting larger once Oracle sets down the end-of-life for its database on the Itanium servers, he said. Oracle's engineering for the RDB database has been done for years on the Stromasys emulators, he said. Over in that DEC community, Oracle provides free transfer licenses for this database onto the Stromasys emulator. Oracle has a presentation "that shows that the RdB database runs about 10 times faster on our emulator than on the original Alpha hardware," Boers said.

In a spot of irony, those Alpha customers were being forced to move to Itanium servers to preserve their environments, although there was a lot of re-engineering to make that migration a success. Oracle's talk of "terminal releases" of Rdb reminds every IT planner that Father Time wins outruns every technology eventually. But Oracle's support of a hardware emulator for Rdb helps make a case for choosing virtualization as a starting point, rather than a migration target. VMware has thorough IT buy-in as an enterprise solution as well as a future on the HPA/3000 solution. Buying specialized servers might build an ecosystem for a vendor to develop. But one business decision like Oracle's -- built upon competition instead of technical ability -- can sweep an ecosystem into hibernation. Although HP's biggest competitor, IBM, has usually given customers a way to protect applications, HP is only learning this now. The prospect of being hibernated doesn't seem to keep HP's customers from buying without a thought for a multiple-decade app lifespan, though.

"Large users of IT technology should be more vocal," Boers said. "They seem to swallow everything the industry does. I am puzzled why large IT consumers of tons of HP systems do this. They should be technically savvy enough to tell HP, "It's nice to go to a new platform -- but are there other ways in which you can sustain my existing business critical applications? A company like IBM has done this forever. In between companies I worked for the biggest bank in the Netherlands. On the Series 360s they had emulation mode for the older applications. They never had a need to replace them."

Holiday Gifts and Promises for All

On Wednesday we took note of some of the first response we received concerning the Stromasys HPA/3000 emulator. One former OpenMPE volunteer said that a $25,000 emulator wouldn't serve his needs. Martin Gorfinkel said he doesn't have his Series 9x9 3000 turned on much anymore, and he'd like to have an archival replacement.

J.P. Bergmans of Stromasys added his reply. "He is absolutely right," Bergmans said. "But I would say that almost whatever the price of the emulator and the equipment would be, a better answer to a need like this is a cloud-based HP 3000/MPE compatible service, billed on usage. This would be a far better solution, and we are indeed looking at that service model."

So we think of that as a present for the new year to come: a brand-new usage-based 3000 solution for our community. Maybe not so brand new, if you want to think of time-sharing of the 70s as the same idea, but certainly refined and turbo-charged for 40 years later.

Here at the NewsWire my co-founder Abby and I are taking the next three days off to celebrate Christmas; even the banks aren't open Monday. We count as our gifts for this year, and the ones to come, our faithful sponsors who make these reports possible: at present, Adager, MB Foster, Speedware, The Support Group, Pivital Solutions, Robelle, ScreenJet, Marxmeier Software, Hillary Software, Genisys, Applied Technologies and its MPE-OpenSource.org web resource, and Taurus Software.  We'll see you all on Tuesday.

Emulator Promise, 3000's Security, Invent3K

Consultant, developer, and advocate for the HP 3000 and open source software Brian Edminster has combined those last two items into a new resource. MPE-OpenSource.org is collecting public, free-use software that can improve 3000 health and longevity, a single porting contributor’s portfolio at a time. We interviewed Edminster for our latest printed issue of the NewsWire and talked about the promise of a 3000 emulator, OpenMPE’s Invent3k server, and the state of PCI security for the 3000.

What is your understanding of how the Stromasys emulator will help a 3000 site? What’s your hope?

It provides new iron that MPE/iX can run on, potentially long past the point when original peripherals are available. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that the technology that the Stromasys emulator is built on will have ways of virtualizing disks too – so we won’t always be limited to processor hardware systems that support standard SCSI-2. Some of the newer SATA and iSCSI drives have remarkable performance.

Do you see the emulator as a solution for the migration-bound site, too?

It depends on how long their migration horizon is. If it’s long enough out, or if they’re having reliability issues with their current hardware configuration –- yes, most definitely. Something that few people consider is: What about data archives? Depending on regulatory requirements – it might be necessary to keep the application and it’s data available for review by auditing authorities for many years beyond migration.

For migrations that are really replacements rather than just re-hosting, it could well be much cheaper to keep a emulated instance of the application at time of conversion, rather than try to mothball a server — and hope it’ll come up okay later.

Is there enough security on hand for companies who need to meet PCI requirements with a 3000?

If properly administered — best practices for password changes, no shared login IDs, ‘application’ users for batch job logins, no insecure file transfer protocols, and so on — MPE/iX’s natively-present security features could be enough. They need to be used in conjunction with secure file transfer protocols (sftp or scp), and if the system has credit card data on it, you need third-party encrypted backup tools. Since there’s not currently a working ssh command-line available, I’d recommend that such a machine be segregated in the application domain, so that session user logins aren’t allowed.

I’ve had systems that were technically ‘in’ the CDE (Card Data Environment). But because the actual card data wasn’t handled on the 3000, and because session users were ‘locked’ into the application without ‘CI’ access, FTP and telnet were disabled, and only SFTP was used in machine-to-machine communication, we were able to pass PCI audits.

Something people should be aware of: No two PCI audits are the same, so your mileage may vary. Something sorely lacking is a working ‘ssh’ login capability – so we don’t have clear-text passwords (and application data!) from our workstations traveling the network.

Few people have paid for an annual subscription to the OpenMPE Invent3K server. Why did you?

Two reasons, although only the second one was a conscious choice. 1) Because it’s an inexpensive way to support OpenMPE, and 2) It’s a bargain as a way to ensure I’ve got a fully loaded MPE/iX system to work/play on. Come on, there’s no cheaper way to go! Even with a Series 918 sitting on your desk, you’d spend more in electricity than the $99 costs (and that’s not even considering wait-time: a 918 is painfully slow compared to the multi-CPU 989 System of Invent3K). And on top of that, Invent3K has a full compliment of development tools.

I can't help but wonder why the other 16 Invent3K subscribers can't come up with their $99 subscription fee, even if they're not using their accounts. That's less than 30 cents per day for access to a 9x9 system with a full compliment of development tools! The electricity to run (and AC to cool) a 9x9 system costs more than that, even if you had one of your own. I know first-hand; I have several 3000s of various vintages, but they're rarely online these days, for just that reason.

What’s the most special moment you’ve had in this marketplace since you starting working with 3000s more than 30 years ago?

Actually – there were two standouts. First: During my early days with Gary Green at AIMS, Inc., I got a chance to meet D. David Brown of Nice Corporation and his lovely fiance Nancy. It was on one of our trips through Salt Lake City on our way to Seattle to make a sales visit to Wayerhauser. Little did I know that I’d get to sit in the co-pilot’s seat of his Cessna 310 during the out-and-back trip from SLC to SEA/TAC! I love flying, and this was most awesome.

Second: The 2008 GHRUG Conference, where I presented my first paper at a conference, got to meet some of the remaining big names in 3000-land in person, but mostly — Having the ever so gracious Alfredo Rego be so nice to my fiance at the start of his keynote address. Not being a technical person at all, she was clearly out of her element, and he went out of his way to make her feel more at home. You don’t see that kind of class nearly often enough these days. The memory of that single act of kindness will live with us both for the rest of our days.

Stromasys unveils emulator's price points

Colorizing the Future: In the chart above (click for details), the versions of the Charon HPA/3000 emulator are priced by color. The initial release of the virtualized server solution that puts MPE/iX on Intel chips will be sold as projects until mid-2012, with prices running between $25,000 and $100,000. A software-only version, sold without an Intel i7 Core PC, hits the market in July, priced below $25,000. N-Class sized emulators will be sold for more than $100,000.

Stromasys has unveiled a product pricing and rollout plan for its HPA/3000 emulator, a strategy that is designed to give the vendor a six-month period to polish the product by working closely with early adopters. These companies will be spending between $25,000 to $50,000 to create A-Class caliber servers with performance from two to 10 times that of a rock-bottom A400-100-110 server.

Hardware as well as installation services are included in these 3410, 3510 and 3520 models. By April, according to the released plan, one- and two-processor A500-class servers can be emulated using 8GB of RAM. The larger of these configurations will provide 10 times the performance of the two-CPU A500s on the market today. CEO Jean-Paul Bergmans of Stromasys said that the emulator is running with FiberChannel connectivity in the labs today, a key element in replacing the N-Class 3000s where FC is almost universally used.

Bergmans said that the "Son of Zelus" package running under $25,000 can have adopters who want a 3000 they can operate in archival mode.

"There's a different opportunity for everybody, which is to provide them HP 3000 archival services based on a cloud implementation," Bergmans said. "It's something for people who want to store off the data and just access it occasionally. They probably don't even want to keep a live system anymore."

Stromasys products all run with VMware, he added, and the company releases "appliances" which come fully packaged and come with the supporting operating system -- in this case Linux. "We would prefer not to run on VMware before July" with the HPA/3000 Charon, he added. "But there is no technical reason why you couldn't do this with the very first release of these products."

The initial release months for the product give Stromasys the chance "to be very closely in touch with our customers directly," he said. Starting in mid-year some kind of reseller channel will be available, probably focused on the software-only implementation at first.

Until July it's quality, rather than quantity that's the goal of the rollout. "We don't expect to have hundreds of customers by the middle of the year," Bergmans said. "We're really looking at working hand-in-hand on the reasonably-sized systems, probably multi-systems. We'll have our engineers on site and do this in an in-depth, fully controlled way."

"The last thing you want to do is pre-release a product prematurely, and then have negative feedback," he added. "To be able to afford to give such close and intensive support, it needs to be worthwhile for both the customer and for ourselves." He said this is how Stromasys started marketing its VAX and Alpha emulators, which have been available for six and three years respectively, and now emulate the work of more than 4,000 of those Digital servers.

 

Opening Resources for a Long 3000 Future

Brian Edminster makes an open secret of his sharing practices. The consultant, developer and advocate for the HP 3000 and open source software has combined those last two items into a new resource this fall. MPE-OpenSource.org is amassing a collection of public, free-use software that can improve 3000 health and longevity, one porting contributor’s portfolio at a time. His first contact with a 3000 was in high school on a Series II, hacking over dialup using an HP2640A terminal. He started programming on a 3000 in 1978 for an HP Value Added Reseller, going on to work with a 3000 graphics software vendor, with MM II Customiser software, computer administering for the UPI news service, developing and managing an Amisys healthcare system, as well as jobs managing the HMS retail apps used in airports — plus diving outside the 3000 to rewrite and rehost to AIX, Informix, Windows Server, SQL Server, and Oracle.

It’s not common to find a 3000 pro of 33 years who still has the gusto that Edminster displays. He’s been a fulltime independent contractor and consultant for the last 10 years, operating Applied Technologies. Some of the work involves using open source tools to extend 3000 ability. He’s a proponent of the idea that HP 3000s can still pass PCI security audits. And he’s also sponsored OpenMPE with contributions, a very rare profile in the community. We emailed our questions to him after his website just got publishing permission from Lars Appel — an open source porting legend who moved Samba to MPE/iX, among other projects.

What prompted you to start a repository of open source software?

Well, at the risk of being flippant – because no one else was doing it. With the demise and only partial reviving of Jazz, much of the free content was dwindling. Yes, Chris Bartram’s www.3k.com site has some open source apps, and so do some others – but many of them cheated and only linked to the software on Jazz. So when Jazz went offline, so did availability of that software.

Also, www.MPE-OpenSource.org focuses on just that: Open source software. I’m working to host software when I can get permission, and link to it (with backup copy kept) in other cases. I’ll host scripts and freeware (code that’s free but not open source), but that’s not the site’s primary focus.

I am still actively looking for contributions. If you haven’t talked to me yet, and you’d like to host software on my site — even if you have no intention of supporting it — drop me an email.

What would you say are the three most useful open source tools for a 3000 site doing its own administration?

One of my short-list projects for MPE-OpenSource is getting MPE/iX clients published for management systems like XYMon. I’m also playing with some Perl scripts that are designed to make managing disk space easier. “Which 3 tools” is not as important as just making sure that MPE/iX can play nice with whatever an enterprise is using to monitor/manage their other systems.

What non-3000 experiences and engagements have helped you in managing 3000 site issues?

That’s almost funny. If anything, it’s the other way around. Even though the system is nearly legendary in its robustness, I’ve come to the conclusion that the real reason that the 3000 has served so reliably for so long is because the people that manage it are careful. I call them the Belt and Suspenders crowd. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

What’s the non-3000 technology that you have found most fun to use?

I’d have to say use of PCs as workstations, in spite of the love-hate relationship I have with them. All kidding aside, we’ve come a long way since the days of DOS and Windows 3.. Using workstation-based IDEs (like ProgrammerStudio) have revolutionized programming productivity. Even something as simple as having a terminal emulator with a display longer than 24 lines makes a remarkable difference. Also, use of data analysis tools on the workstation (even tools as simple as Excel) have changed the way we follow the data. It makes identifying trends and patterns in data significantly easier to recognize.

Why did you donate to OpenMPE during its fundraising drives?

Two reasons: Because I could – and this was primarily because of the 3000. MPE/iX’s been Very Very Good to me. And like my website, it’s a way of giving back to the community.

Secondly, because I want this platform to live on, until the ease of administration and robustness in operation commonly found under MPE/iX application systems is so common as to be taken for granted in any other system.

In many ways, the 3000 was quite a bit ahead of its time, and can still lead by example with regard to how robust a system can and should be. I believe in what OpenMPE was trying to do in those efforts, regardless of where it is now, or ends up in the future.

How far would you estimate, in years, an HP 3000 site can take a production system?

There’s a lot of comments along the lines of “Running them until the wheels fall off.” So I guess you’re asking how long it’ll be until that happens. The answer is: it depends, but from a practical perspective, quite a long time. The parts that wear out are mostly the moving parts (disk drives, tape drives, and cooling fans). It’s already getting difficult to find SCSI disk drives under 9GB.

Ultimately, we’ll have to start using interface adapters, and unless someone gets clever and figures out how to partition a large physical disk into multiple smaller logical disks, we’ll end up wasting the majority of the drive’s capacity (the maximum space addressable by MPE/iX version 7.5 on a single drive is 512GB, and under v 6.5 only 300GB). Really, the only thing we need a tape for is using SLT/CSLT tapes, when replacing a system volume set. Backups will become nearly completely store-to-disk or equivalent with FTP or some other transfer method to an external storage mechanism or provider.

The next software gotcha is the limit of the date intrinsics (at the rollover from 2027 to 2028) but I trust we can deal with that in a similar way to how Y2K was addressed. From a practical perspective, I’d venture to guess that the hardware will outlive the business need for some homegrown software systems, unless they continue to grow — and that’s an especially exciting possibility with the new Stromasys emulator coming available.

Something I’ve discovered is software/systems are like sharks. They’ll die if they stop moving. Even when a businesses’s needs are relatively static, technology isn’t. Eventually, there’ll be a ‘better’ way to solve the business need with newer technologies – unless the software integrates new technologies, as appropriate.

How a Database Keeps Apps from Stalling

This fall Michael Marxmeier put his continued 3000 support behind the first HP3000 Reunion, one of three gatherings he’s co-sponsored along with ScreenJet since the first in 2005, when Interex canceled HP World. The creator of the Eloquence database, he migrated the internals of IMAGE with a TurboIMAGE Compatibility Extension, while including expensive tools such as replication and high-powered indexing to Eloquence, a product priced for the budget-wary 3000 market. We wanted to check back eight years after we first introduced him in a Q&A to a market which didn’t know Eloquence well, but could already see value in migration to a solution which understood the HP 3000’s database.

Our first part of this year's Q&A addressed the changes in the Itanium market for databases, especially in light of the Oracle conflicts. We spoke to him via Skype on 11-11-11, the Friday before the 10th anniversary of HP’s pullout from the 3000 marketplace.

You’ve talked about an application stalling look like to an organization?

At some customer sites, they get through the migration. But after they’ve had all this effort to move, they don’t do anything more. The application is basically frozen at the point where the migration happened, rather than evolving. However, applications don’t exist in thin air; they’re there to fulfill a business need.  As the business requirements and technology are evolving, if the application is unchanged, its value is reduced over time. If you just let it stall, in a few years it’s not longer viable to run the business, you can’t change things easily anymore, people have retired — all the typical things you see as problems in a legacy environment. Although you’ve migrated, you’re forced to replace the application with something off the shelf. That’s got its own pain to endure as well.

Evolving and continuing to provide value to your company’s applications is important. Most businesses are not stalled, and the technology environment certainly hasn’t. For example, tablets are becoming extremely popular. So the questions come, “Can’t we just give tablets to some of our employees, or make it accessible from the outside?” It’s a difficult question, one that is the responsibility of the IT team to respond to — mobile needs like that. PCI is another change you need to react to, and there are more coming down the line.

You have to have somebody to think a bit ahead, and be aware of what’s the industry is moving to, and find a way of incrementally moving your platform – instead of replacing it, or waiting until there’s nothing else to be done.

You usually move some enhancements into your Eloquence product with a public beta test period. What impact do such regular improvements make on the ability to keep an application climbing?

To get it right, you must have a few customers playing with this stuff before it’s released. Some enhancements are available for the current release as a patch, at the moment. The idea is to make these as public as possible, because we gain quite a bit of feedback from our existing customers.

We’ve found most customers have a small team running their shop, and it’s most beneficial to make incremental changes to their applications. This is something a small team can do, and it’s easy to find immediate use for these things.
   
What is the most desirable target for Eloquence in 2012, now that you’re beyond the adoption by ISVs? How do you make a case for an un-migrated 3000 customer to choose this to replace IMAGE?

We want to show — with technology like the full-text indexing of release 8.20 which will be our major 2012 release — what value makes sense for applications. What’s important about this full text indexing in Eloquence is that it will look like Google, where you it gets you a million results within a fraction of a millisecond. And we’ll have another release to provide this kind of major functionality.

For a customer on the 3000, our strategy is just as it has been before: Eloquence is a problem-solver, proven technology that covers every detail of a database and application migration, and it’s working in hundreds of sites everyday. It’s inexpensive, and it’s certainly the least painful migration option for a database. In going to Eloquence you don’t have to be afraid of getting stalled — because there’s something you cannot do which you did on the 3000.
   
What problems does Eloquence solve for a migrating customer?

If you stay on the 3000, you’re frozen in time. Eloquence keeps evolving. Even for emulator users, there’s a good question to be answered. There might be some workarounds to implement some of the technology changes like PCI and encryption, but does it make sense? Can you afford to miss all those changes the outside world might be demanding on your business and your application?

I think it will get harder and harder to get those working sufficiently well on the 3000. You not only have a stalled application, you have a stalled environment.
   
What’s the magic inside the TurboIMAGE Compatibility Extension? Is it essential to deploying Eloquence in a former 3000 enterprise?

There’s no magic involved, just engineering and attention to detail. Eloquence was always designed to support IMAGE applications. Our original customers used IMAGE, too. Eloquence is a second or third-generation IMAGE, I think. In the ‘90s, everybody was talking about moving to Windows. So we canned our first IMAGE implementation and rewrote from scratch, and we made sure that it uses the same technology or similar approaches we learned from relational databases. It was critical to us that IMAGE just worked, just as it did before. The core things the 3000 customer expects are already there. Then there were more engineering enhancements, to make sure we had things that turned out to be important in the migration scope. We found a solution to move a large amount of data around, for example.
   
How has the relational side of Eloquence evolved since 3000 customer migrations began in earnest in 2004?

In the past, relational had its own value, although few customers could tell you what it means. It’s a way the database is structured, and completely unrelated to the technology below it. What it means in practice is that relational is a mainstream database: SQL Server or Oracle. Using that definition, we are not a relational database. We are using a similar technology to a relational database, transactions, locking, so most of what runs in Eloquence is relational. But it doesn’t make sense to have another second-tier SQL database on the market.

Fortunately perception has changed, in that not everything needs to be relational. If your current 3000 database were emulated on top of a SQL database, would there be any value to it? Most likely, the answer is no. What is important is interoperability — that our customers can access their database like they would through a relational database like Microsoft Access, or though Java. We have a major customer running Visual Basic on top of Eloquence.

We think of what our customers actually need from us. There’s a relational view for Eloquence, an ODBC and JDBC driver. We’ve seen customers enhancing their applications by making use of SQL access to their database. But that’s not the primary way our customers interact with their databases.

Database supports Itanium, Intel, Linux

Michael Marxmeier wants to make migrations more than an exit from using HP 3000s. His company has sold the closest replacement for the IMAGE/SQL database for more than 12 years, as Eloquence moved into software vendors like Summit Technologies when their apps shifted to HP-UX or Windows. HP was touting his product as the cleanest and most adept choice for migrations nearly 10 years, when the vendor first started to advise customers about tools to make your massive IT shift possible.

Marxmeier has been studying IMAGE a long time. When the product was called HP Eloquence – it’s now an independent solution – it was employed by HP 250 business users who were being ushered off their super-PC business systems, where IMAGE was their database and the hardware cards were the same as those on the 1980s 3000s. Eloquence was born of an HP transition similar to the one the 3000 community has begun. That small business machine had a customer community much like the 3000’s and Marxmeier wrote a work-alike system to help his company move its applications onto HP’s Unix systems.

You’ve been one the earliest advocates and developers on Itanium. Does its future in the market, especially in light of the Oracle conflict, or its ability to compete on a tech basis, worry you?

We are not worried at all. HP uses Itanium as a viable option for businesses, and it works just fine. We certainly will continue to support it for the future. Unlike Oracle, it’s easy for us to make a commitment to it. We didn’t find it hard to develop for Itanium or to support it. We even support some exotic implementations like Linux on Itanium.

Itanium certainly has its users, and it’s hard to tell if it will make it or not. However, this shouldn’t be a concern to the customer. But if they’d like to move to something else, the proven technology of Linux is readily available. About half of our customers are using Linux these days.

The good thing about these open environments is that moving from one box to another is typically easy. Like in a COBOL shop, if you get another compiler and recompile your application, you’re pretty much there. Everything else works the same. Unix is a Unix is a Unix. If you’re familiar with HP-UX and you come across Linux, you will feel at home immediately.

When you first entered the 3000 migration market you said that Eloquence might have a role at a company as a bridge technology, before a migration to Oracle. Has your view changed, now that Oracle is battling with HP over support of Itanium servers?

Eloquence has a history of being a temporary solution that becomes permanent. Yes, we thought customers would use Eloquence as a temporary solution and move on to something else.  But we have not seen customers moving to Eloquence, then subsequently moving to another database. It seems there simply was no need for it. When we released the first version it was designed to work for two or three years to bridge the gap, while they re-wrote their applications in native Unix. But that was almost 20 years ago, and we’re still doing fine.

It’s certainly not getting easier going to Oracle. But HP was convincing customers that it was a business advantage to go to Oracle. They thought they needed it to be successful, but that’s and idea that’s become less popular recently.

We have two markets that we cater to. One is our existing Eloquence users, because we have a decent-sized user base. It’s most important for us that they have what they need to be successful.  By now the majority of that migration business is over, and that’s okay. ISVs have settled in place; they’ve probably already moved on. At the beginning they had to come up with a solution to keep their customers successful, and quickly.

But there also are quite a few end-users out there, and with all the knowledge we’ve gained we’ll address the needs of those users specifically. They will benefit from almost a decade of successful migrations. Things have become easier than they were at the beginning.

Customers are moving to other application packages. When they migrate and do nothing else, they can find out five years later it’s the end of the line for that package. This is even harder than the original migration. They are looking into heaps of hardware to do it, lots of consultants. Replacing a package with something that is standard like Oracle is not as easy as it sounds. Moving to something complex, just because it’s newer, is sometimes not worthwhile.

3000 people think of Eloquence as a database to stand in for IMAGE, but what other features and modules do such architects and developers overlook about it?

It has lots of interesting stuff beyond the database: a programming language, a user interface tool, patch integration and more. However, I think most of these functions are something 3000 customers will not use. Of more interest would be the PCL utility coming in the next version, which allows converting PCL output on the server to PDF or Postscript. Of most interest should be the database enhancements.

The continual improvements to Eloquence go beyond HP’s IMAGE functionality: replication, item masking, database encryption, auditing, FWUTIL [to access forward log file that holds archived committed transactions] — all integrated in the product and ready to use. Most of this stuff incrementally enhances existing applications. It works for migrated applications just as well as for Eloquence applications.

Next time: How a database can keep applications from stalling

HP news mortal, legal, financial this month

Hewlett-Packard may be picking itself up off the mat this quarter, but the immediate news from this supplier of an HP 3000 alternative hasn't been good, just one week into this month.

Most immediately, interim HP chairwoman Patty Dunn has died of ovarian cancer, which she first contracted in 2004. The 58-year-old Dunn served as chairman of HP board during 2005, while the company was searching for a successor to Carly Fiorina, who the board had ousted earlier that year. According to the Wall Street Journal, a 4-page memo of "concerns" written by Dunn was instrumental in getting Fiorina sacked by the board. Dunn's time in the chairman's post ended her career at HP. After Congressional hearings where she had to testify in 2006 (above) Dunn was told to resign from the board over her role in the company's "pretexting" actions of '05: News emerged in 2006 about HP's hired and internal investigators trying to locate boardroom leaks to the media, using shams and misidentifying themselves to obtain phone records of directors and reporters. The pretexting sank down to family members of reporters, at its lowest point. (In a smack of irony, Dunn graduated with a journalism degree from U Cal Berkeley.)

HP paid a $14.5 million fine and Dunn faced criminal charges in the case that established a record of HP identity theft. The charges were later dismissed after Dunn refused to accept a plea bargain. With Dunn's resignation, Dick Hackborn was the only director left on HP's board from the pre-Compaq days. An excellent book on the sordid affair is The Big Lie: Spying, Scandal, and Ethical Collapse at Hewlett Packard, by Anthony Bianco, in which the "Dunn and Dusted" chapter is most informative. HP stated that "Pattie Dunn worked tirelessly for the good of HP. We are saddened by the news of her passing, and our thoughts go out to her family on their loss."

Not much further back in this month's timeline, HP felt it had to respond on Dec. 2 to a new counter-suit in its legal battle with Oracle. The maker of the databases which are used in more HP Unix systems than any other is now charging HP with "seven counts, including charges of fraud, defamation, intentional interference with contractual relations, intentional interference with prospective economic advantage, as well as violation of the Lanham Act and two violations of the California Business and Professional Code," according to an article on the website The Register. There's no peaceful settlement in sight between the two tech titans, which is probably why HP has started to recommend DBEnterprise as an Oracle replacement for its HP-UX customers, and Mimer for the OpenVMS sites.

HP has responded to the claim that Hewlett-Packard deceived Oracle and hid a program to pay Intel to prop up Itanium. "Today’s filing is another example of Oracle attempting to distract from the undeniable fact that it has breached its contractual commitment to HP and ignored its repeated promises of support to our shared customers," HP said in a press release, one where it laid out its version of the facts in the relationship. Partners of HP and Oracle have been slow to comment on the battle, not wanting to anger either of the combatants.

The Register says that HP wanted clauses in an agreement that permitted Oracle to hire the ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd, conditions that would have given HP extended access to Java developments, "its ability to sell Solaris on x86 platforms, and ongoing support from Oracle for its software stack on HP-UX."

In the end, HP had to settle for the language below, a legal clause that Hewlett-Packard now says commits Oracle to support Itanium systems.

Oracle and HP reaffirm their commitment to their longstanding strategic relationship and their mutual desire to continue to support their mutual customers. Oracle will continue to offer its product suite on HP platforms and HP will continue to support Oracle products (including Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM) on its hardware in a manner consistent with that partnership.

Perhaps as a result of that Oracle conflict that's crushing HP's HP-UX sales, along with the $10.2 billion HP acquisition of Autonomy, HP's credit rating has been reduced by Standard & Poors. (It's instructive to remember that S&P ratings were one of the chief elements that created the 2008 financial meltdown, as the company over-rated corporation after corporation to pump up the financial balloon to bursting.)

But the S&P bond reports remain a belwether to finance planning and debt. HP got downgraded corporate credit and senior unsecured ratings to 'BBB' from 'A,' which increases HP's borrowing costs. HP just reports that it increased its long-term debt by almost 50 percent year over year during its M&A spree of the last year, and its cash on hand is down to a level that's brand-new to the company's 21st Century fiscal history. The company's P/E valuation has climbed to 8.2x since the darkest days right after CEO Leo Apotheker was fired. Traders seemed to shrug off the S&P downgrade; HP shares are still trading around $28.

HP Connects users on power and cloud

By Terry Floyd
The Support Group

The HP Connect users group sponsored a luncheon seminar meeting in Austin a few weeks ago, with two diverse speakers and topics. Kristi Browder, Executive Director and COO of Connect, lead the meeting and introduced the speakers.

Clyde Poole, of TDi Technologies, talked about “What you Should Know Before Moving to the Cloud.” It was not a sales pitch for his Plano-based company; rather, the presentation was a generic and informative speech. Clyde spoke from years of data center experience as he covered the “gotcha’s” of cloud computing. He discussed three or four definitions of “the cloud” and gave examples of each (SalesForce, Amazon, etc.). It was a speech intended to urge caution when moving data to the cloud, covering legal and security issues and their inherent risk exposures.

Clyde’s best tip was to visit wiki.cloudsecurityalliance.org, a site where the CSA describes issues concerning cloud deployment. There you learn where Clyde got some of his ideas about the major Service Models: SaaS (Software), PaaS (Platform), and IaaS (Infrastructure). On that site is also a great piece on Public vs. Private clouds (and Hybrids) and about required characteristics of clouds, such as Resource Pooling, Broad Network Access, Rapid Elasticity, Self-Service provisioning, and what Measured Services means.

David Chetham-Strode, an HP’er of 15 years, spoke on “Power and Cooling”, introducing innovations the invent brand has introduced in the last year or two. He spoke about new power distribution products that have come out of HP’s own data center projects. David spent a lot of time discussing power loss and what Hewlett Packard has done to increase efficiencies from 90 percent to as much as 98 percent, big savings in electricity in big data centers. He revealed secrets of air flow and “cooling from within the row of servers” instead of from above or below.

David also mentioned the “chimney” products and why they have no fans (not just that they are not needed, but that they disrupt the flow). Did you know that the new rear doors on the solidly-built HP cabinets have more holes than their competitors’ cabinets? This presentation was interesting to me, even the minutia about power cabling, the explanation of why blue was used for the A/C connections’ color coding, and the fact that HP is working on eliminating A/C and going with D/C for the most efficiency possible.

A couple of dozen people attended the free seminar and I’m sure all agreed that the meal was excellent. Everyone received a 1GB USB storage device with HP’s name and a Connect koozie. I won one of the two door prizes, a bag of goodies including the ever-present and very high quality HP mouse pad, as well as two different mice, another 1GB thumb drive, and a pedometer (in case I wanted to know how many steps it was back to my car – several hours later it is up to 2,245).

I learned a few useful, interesting items and met some nice people, including four Connect employees and four HP people. It was a good effort and worth my time to try to re-connect with Connect. But it’s lonesome for an MPE guy in this world. I identified Compaq and Non-Stop people, but HP-UX was probably in the majority of the crowd’s resumes.

Apple ready to overtake HP in PCs

It's Black Friday here in the US, a day when retail outlets prod consumers out of bed with "doorbuster" prices that launch with a handful of rock-bottom-priced electronics. Silly things like $50 tablets jostle with $79 HDTVs and $329 HP 17-inch Pavillion laptops at Best Buy.

But Apple's going to be offering its gear at retail stores pretty much at list prices. The vendor insists its retailers don't do much of the come-ons for Black Friday, where 10 or so units at each store get sold starting at midnight. (Tickets for the BestBuy midnight entry were passed out last night). The retailers like it, but it can't do much for the vendor's sales at such small quantities.  A report just released by analyst Canalys shows that Apple is poised to take over HP's position in PC sales soon, if not in the current quarter. That's the No. 1 position. HP's got no tablet to sell, while the iPad 3 is expected next spring.

Canalys reports the overall PC market is growing by 18 percent this year. The growth has come at HP's expense, considering how fast Apple is overtaking the vendor. HP doesn't need to be No. 1 any more than Apple ever did. But it needs profitability out of its PC business, something Apple hasn't struggled to attain in the last decade.

Oracle Harm to 3000s & HP, Past and Present

Oracle has become a loud competitor to HP in the migration alternative game. HP took an hour's webcast this month to assert that the Oracle-Sun-Solaris action is mostly heat without much light to lead the way. But the database has certainly gained HP's attention now that ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd is leading the Sun attack. If some stories are to be believed, however, the current fracas is a long way removed from Oracle's blows against the HP 3000's futures.

At one point HP was eager to keep its 3000 customers buying Hewlett-Packard enterprise solutions. And by 2001, the story goes, Oracle wanted a clear path to selling Oracle hosted on HP's Unix servers. HP was going to cut something out of its merged product line with Compaq. The 9000s were never on the block, but there was the HP 3000, sporting tens of thousands of systems, nearly all of them running an IMAGE SQL database.

So here goes: HP didn't kill the HP 3000, Oracle did. Oracle made HP a deal they couldn't refuse. Stop selling competing database software, and Oracle would partner to sell HP-UX systems as Oracle servers.  Since MPE/iX is tightly coupled to IMAGE/SQL, this translated to the end of the HP 3000. The smoking gun was supposedly this: As part of HP's announcement on discontinuing the HP 3000, it included the end-of-life for Allbase/SQL on both MPE and HP-UX.

The theory has some credibility. In 2001 there was a lot of growth potential for Oracle-plus-HP-UX. Oracle had grown up plenty in the decade before that fateful date (when its CEO Larry Ellison, left, was a tender 47 years old.) In 1991 his juggernaut was pretty much out of the game, even with 20,000 customers, because it was scraping the bottom of its cash barrel. Some reports said Oracle creditors were ready to call in their 1991 notes. Those 20,000 sites arrived in the fold because Oracle got ruthless about sales and promises and vaporware delivery. $80 million in cash from Nippon Steel in exchange for a piece of the Oracle Japan arm helped Oracle back from the brink, too. Then there was a forced restatement of sales all the way back to the company's first quarter as a public company. Booking nonexistent products and stretching future contracts as current revenues, it was all the kind of behavior old-school sales reps would chuckle about today -- a day when Oracle wants to rock the 2011 boat, charging that HP is paying Intel to prop up the Itanium product line.

The old-school files here in our office include InformationWeek and Computerworld stories about how Oracle came back from the brink in 1992-93. Oracle users frustrated by wait for DBMS, tools said a story by Jean Bozman. She was a reporter in those days before becoming an IDG analyst, one who figured the world still had more than 25,000 active 3000 systems running, two full years after HP dropped its axe on its 3000 unit.

Over at InformationWeek, the "hungry to profits" company was struggling to deliver Oracle 7 (the latest version is 11, with 12 in the wings). A list of that year's Oracle Business Alliance Program members didn't include HP, even though by then Hewlett-Packard's strategy was in total thrall with Unix. Oracle still was the leader in Unix databases in that era, selling just a bit more than half of Unix RDBMS installations. Sybase was jousting at Oracle with a preannoucement of Version 10 of its database, which one newsletter said was "an announcement, if it's possible, with even more hot air than Oracle's Version 7."

Meanwhile, there was no hot air in the IMAGE of that period. HP was being led by the nose by its customers to keep IMAGE an integrated part of the 3000 solution. Hewlett-Packard wanted to separate IMAGE from the 3000 and make the database an add-on. A revolt at the Interex user group conference of 1990 ensued. Even though the users carried the day -- and Jim Sartain became a business-savvy IMAGE R&D manager afterward -- the IMAGE standard bearers look see this as the start of the decline of HP's attention to IMAGE, business-wise.

Oracle couldn't be bothered with current 3000 R&D from that point onward. Jennie Hou was yoked to the HP's thankless task of getting Oracle resources devoted to MPE/iX -- because HP hoped Oracle would attract customers in the 3000 arena. Oracle just didn't eager to attract any off of the 3000 platform, maybe because developing for MPE wasn't the Unix business Oracle had used to get off the mat. Or maybe Oracle saw the folly -- which it first told me in 1985 -- of competing with a bundled solution like IMAGE. While the rest of the industry was deploying Oracle 8, that release was out of reach for the 3000 user. We wrote in 1997:

It only took one Oracle sales rep in California to get the 3000 customer base worried about the future of the database on MPE/iX. One rep's comment to a 3000 customer circulated through the Internet, asserting that Oracle was only going to support its database through version 7.2.3 for the HP 3000. This led to a fair bit of piling on, as people wondered what the purported pullout meant for the HP 3000 and why anybody would want to get serious about using Oracle instead of IMAGE anyway.

HP and Oracle went to work on damage control almost immediately. The two allies whipped up a quick update on their plans for the HP 3000. The sale's rep's comments were based on a partial truth: Oracle is still not willing to commit to a list of supported platforms for Release 8. Despite what some might see in the tea leaves of whether the 3000 is mentioned on Oracle's Web page roll call, no one using any platform knows for certain when they're getting an Oracle 8 -- not just yet.

Oracle 8 on the HP 3000? One year later, HP had committed its own engineers to just getting a fresher Oracle 7 onto the platform.

CSY has engineers working on the port of Oracle 7.3.4 according to Jennie Hou, the manager of the HP 3000-Oracle relationship. “The porting resources are still engaged in 7.3.4,” she said, which HP expects to be available to 3000 customers within calendar 1998. Version 7.3.2.31 is currently shipping for both MPE/iX 5.0 and 5.5 HP 3000s. There has been no announcement of an Oracle 8 port from CSY yet, “because customer needs are being met by Oracle 7,” Hou said. Oracle-based applications are ready for the HP 3000 in manufacturing, financials and human resources, and Oracle plays a part in data warehousing solutions for MPE/iX.

An Allbase pullout as a smoking gun would be hard to point at HP's 3000 history. The database had its fans among some 3000 sites, but it seemed to be more of a "other option" item on the HP pricelist. More than 95 percent of the 3000's sites were running IMAGE/SQL and still do. That's one reason that Eloquence has done so well as a database migration replacement for 3000 sites: it behaves just as IMAGE does with 3000 programs that are moved to HP-UX or Windows platforms.

3000 users watched a lot of one-sided pursuit of Oracle affections during that decade leading to the pullout. By the fall of '98 it was obvious HP 3000 customers didn't want to fork over tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars for a database instead of IMAGE. Winston Prather announced the end of Oracle futures on MPE/iX at the HP World conference -- one year before taking over as 3000 GM which led to, well, the end of HP's futures altogether for the 3000.

“The current plan is that there is no plan to port Oracle8,” Prather said at the 1998 forums. “The real fundamental issue: Oracle’s position is that, ‘We’ve worked really hard with you to bring it to the platform and done joint marketing programs, and it’s not working.’ Oracle is looking at it and going, ‘Why am I doing this?’ They haven’t come close to recouping their investment. Their current feeling right now is that there’s not enough business on the 3000.”

Customers using Oracle say the database runs faster on HP 3000s than on HP 9000s, something that HP might want to use in making a case for additional development resources. Prather noted that customer adoption has been slight in the face of a more cost-effective 3000 database: IMAGE/SQL.

“It’s very expensive to implement an Oracle solution relative to a TurboIMAGE solution or even an Allbase solution,” Prather said. “The bottom line is that 3000 customers like TurboIMAGE. They don’t want to leave TurboIMAGE. Our application providers don’t want to move to Oracle, because they like TurboIMAGE."

It's not like HP wasn't trying to sell the database. In 1996 it offered Oracle's 7.2.3 version to 3000 sites at prices starting under $1,200 per seat with an eight-seat minimum. For the first time, you could get a small 3000 into Oracle for just under 10,000. The price per-seat increased based on HP's CPU tiers of the day -- that under-$1,200 price was only available for the lowest 3000 tier. Price was a barrier vs. an included database, and then there was migration.

The HP pricing doesn't alleviate the roadblocks of data migration and increased management demands. Taurus Software's Forklift migration tool, which uses a graphical interface to map IMAGE datasets to Oracle tables by way of the Taurus Warehouse utility, was the start of moving data as easily as any tool on other platforms. Forklift gave managers a visual aid to get IMAGE data into Oracle databases.

Within five years Oracle wouldn't have IMAGE to dodge around anymore while it sold HP's systems. Wht good did that do in the long run? By this month, Oracle doesn't even want those HP Unix systems to exist. Its charge of paying Intel to keep Itanium alive is pretty blustery with hot-air, even by Oracle's standards. HP doesn't make Itanium anymore, even though its engineers retain a role in processor design. Itanium is an Intel product by now, and if HP is chipping in extra dollars to keep development going, that's in HP's best interest to keep selling its Unix servers.

We find it interesting to see how Oracle has crept back from the "Itanium is dead, and Intel isn't saying" hot air of this spring. Intel came back with an opposing gust that might have knocked long-time yachtsman Larry Ellison off the "attack Intel" tack that's part of his warpath on HP. Oracle can't hurt the 3000 anymore, can it? That depends on how you think of the Integrity servers as 3000 migration replacements. This Oracle war is creating distractions for HP's Integrity sales.

Is it a test next Wednesday, or the real thing?

By Birket Foster
MB Foster Associates

Remember growing up where a test of the emergency alert system would periodically come on the radio with a piercing noise, and inform you that this was just a test, and in the case of a real emergency further instructions will follow? It's coming back, sooner than you think. We expect to hear it just minutes before our next webinar.

For the first time ever, the FCC and FEMA are conducting a nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS). It will happen at 2 pm Eastern on Wednesday, November 9 -- just 2 days before binary day (you know, 111111, or November 11, '11).

Will our children even know what this is about, as they get home from school and have their favorite TV show interrupted by an emergency signal? Will housewives everywhere worry about the “national emergency” that will appear to be happening? Maybe it will have the same impact on society as the radio play of HG Wells  “The War of the Worlds,” a timeless science fiction classic of the invasion of earth by Martians.

Our live demonstration of MBF Scheduler, and the recently announced enhancements of HIPRI, RUNNOW and Subqueues, will take 45 minutes -- but during the first two minutes we will see how the world reacts to EAS, and then carry on from there.

Wikipedia reports that the EAS is a national warning system in the United States put into place on January 1, 1997, when it superseded the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS), which itself had superseded the CONELRAD System.

In addition to alerting the public of local weather emergencies such as tornadoes and flash floods, the official EAS is designed to enable the President of the United States to speak to the United States within 10 minutes, but the nationwide federal EAS has never been activated. The EAS regulations and standards are governed by the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau of the FCC. Each state and several territories have their own EAS plan. EAS has become part of IPAWS, the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, a program of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). EAS is jointly coordinated by FEMA, the FCC, and the National Weather Service.

So next week for two minutes the airwaves of America (which are broadcast by satellite around the planet) there will be a two-minute alert where the president or at least the White House will interrupt the day for 2 minutes to prove that in the case of the a national emergency you could hear the President – it would just be text and a voice over – no pictures … maybe the lowest common denominator isn’t the best way to go but all radio and TV will be part of the test.

How will you business handle this – are you forewarning people that this test is coming up … At MBFoster we have a webinar scheduled for November 9 at 2pm … it will be about Automating Windows Processes (using MBF Scheduler) … it won’t be a test – it will be the real thing J complete with demonstration … it will take 45 minutes but during the first 2 minutes we will see what the world reaction to the of the EAS is and then carry on from there.

 

Jobs respected HP. HP respects its PCs.

Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs remains atop the bestseller lists this week. It's a remarkable thing to have more than 600 pages of a bio, written by a man who chronicled the lives of Einstein, Ben Franklin and Henry Kissinger, on the streets within three weeks of a tech titan's death.

In an interview with Issacson, he reveals that although Jobs never wanted to work at HP, he admired the company's intentions right up to the end. By the time Jobs stepped down as CEO in August, Hewlett-Packard had already told the world it was thinking about getting rid of its $40 billion PC business. Isaacson said in an interview with CNET that Hewlett-Packard was no joke to Jobs.

When he resigned as CEO, he's in the board room talking to some of its members, and someone mentions that Hewlett-Packard is getting out of the PC market, and people sort of start laughing about it. And he got very serious, and later said it's a real shame, because "Bill Hewlett and David Packard left a really great company that should be destined to survive generations, and that's what I'm trying to do at Apple."

Today brings news that the newest leadership values the biggest part of its survival system. There have been rumors afloat that the spinoff of HP's PCs could turn out to be nothing more than an idea floated for effect. HP announced today that "it has completed its evaluation of strategic alternatives for its Personal Systems Group (PSG) and has decided the unit will remain part of the company."

HP objectively evaluated the strategic, financial and operational impact of spinning off PSG. It’s clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer. “HP is committed to PSG, and together we are stronger."

Whitman said at a quickly-called briefing that she doesn't want HP to spread itself too thin. "HP tries to do a lot of things. And I’m a big believer in doing a small set of things really, really well." At the same time, Apple reported that it will double its capital investments to $8 billion in 2012, according to SEC documents filed today. Of that, almost 15 percent will be aimed at Apple's retail stores. Apple is creating its own retail PC space, since HP inhabits so many shelves elsewhere.

The company which still wants your 3000 support business, as well as selling you a ProLiant or Integrity replacement for that 3000, enjoys advantages by building millions of PCs every year. Component agreements with suppliers benefit all kinds of products the company creates. It looked to be a difficult thing to have a separate company, even a spinoff, keep providing those components and assembly services to an HP which has shorn off its PC business.

HP's employees, especially engineers, are said to be weary of all of the jibes and lashing their company has sparked over the past three months. "We're just trying to finish out the quarter," one said, noting that Apothker hadn't left Hewlett-Packard with a rosy outlook for 2012 business. The fiscal year ends on Monday, with a lot of deal-making going on today and tomorrow to lift up the final quarter.

HP's stock ticked up beyond $27 today, the first time it's cracked that mark since those that PC spinoff and Apothker ouster were announced. And that gain took place before HP announced PCs were staying in the fold. Over the fiscal year while Apotheker worked, the stock has lost 15 percent of its value, even considering its nose-dive in August. HP continues to pay 12-cent dividends per share. This may be a break in HP's stormy weather.

This Silicon Valley icon was not noted for products that touched the masses until its printers broke through in the 1980s, then crowded retailer shelves in the late 1990s. Jobs respected these ancestors of the ideal that was his Apple, by Isaacson's account. His book asserts that Jobs will join Edison and Ford in the pantheon of modern inventor-princes. Hewlett and Packard are just as revered across HP and its oldest customer groups. They simply didn't invent in an era of social networking and broadband media that promoted their work -- or live to have it celebrated at a bestseller rate.

Jobs jumped over HP's Garage to 2.0 life

Last night's 60 Minutes story about Steve Jobs included a report that working for HP was the fate which Jobs strived hard to escape. Walter Issacson, his biographer whose book is both Barnes & Noble's and Amazon's #1 today, said Jobs toiled on the night shift at Atari, and then summertime work at HP loomed. Issacson said Jobs wanted to run his own company and avoid the 1.0 tech career.

There was within him this sort of conflict between being hippy-ish and anti-materialistic, and wanting to sell things like Wozniak's [blue box] board and create a business. I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in [the '70s]. Let's do a start-up in our parents' garage and try to create a business. [Leans in to camera] And Steve Jobs wasn't all that eager to be an employee at Hewlett-Packard.

There's a package online at The Atlantic magazine's website that includes some snippets from the biography, as well as the 15-minute segment of the 60 Minutes show.

Emulator license issues boot up discussion

By Alan Yeo
ScreenJet Ltd.

[Editor's Note: Migration and 3000 renovation software and services supplier Alan Yeo led the way to organize this year's HP3000 Reunion, where the Stromasys CHARON HPA/3000 was first demonstrated and dissected. Here's his views on software licensing matters surrounding the emulator HP has licensed to use existing MPE/iX installations.]

Having been at the Stromasys demonstration at the Reunion, I'm very impressed where they have got. In fact I would go so far as to say that it's a done deal -- at some point in the not-too-distant future there will be a deployable emulator.

As Craig Lalley has described, the model is very clean. One processor runs MPE (not an MPE clone or emulator, but real MPE), whilst another processor emulates the PA-RISC hardware, aka the HP 3000. So the fact that they have MPE booted means that virtually any software or compilers that run under MPE will also run under MPE on the emulated platform (they just won't know they are). It's in the underlying PA-RISC emulation that work is still required to emulate SCSI, network interfaces and other peripheral hardware. But that, as they say, is a simple matter of coding.

As I understand, it the emulator license agreement with HP specifies an PA-RISC 2.0 chip set. So we are talking A- and N-Class hardware emulation and supported peripherals. A and N Classes only support MPE/iX 7.5. This means that whilst the emulator theoretically could be modified to support 7.0, one would have to ask if there was any benefit in the work to do so. 7.5 would be a far more desirable place to be than 7.0. I don't think 2.0 PA-RISC hardware, and therefore an emulation, can run anything less than MPE 7.0.

However as far as moving from an HP 3000 running earlier versions of MPE than 7.0 to an emulated platform, I don't think there is a licensing problem. If you have a licensed copy of MPE you have a license for MPE, not a specific version of MPE. Therefore, HP should allow you to transfer your MPE license. The fact that on the emulator you require version 7.5 should be irrelevant to that process.

So as long as your programs will run under MPE 7.5 they should run on the emulator unaltered. If they don't run under 7.5 for any reason then you may need new versions from your software vendors, or possibly to recompile. Recompiling may be an issue, as I think there were updated versions of some compilers for PA RISC 2.0 -- and as yet I haven't seen any details on HP's position regarding the licensing/use of later subsystem software. But I'm sure that is just a technicality :-)

Software licensing (other than MPE) on an emulated platform is going to be the proverbial can of worms. I suspect that some [third party and independent] vendors will take a realistic approach -- that the majority of customers are going to get very little advantage running on an emulated HP 3000 over running on a real HP 3000 -- and will happily continue to support and earn revenue from it running on an emulated HP 3000. Others may be less reasonable.

There will no doubt be some lively discussions over the coming year as to what an HP 3000 is. But if a piece of hardware boots MPE and reports an identical HPSUSAN and HPCPUNAME it would be hard to say that it wasn't an HP 3000. As they say, 'If it looks like a fish and smells like a fish, it's probably a fish.'

As far as Tier-Licensed software goes, the argument that an emulated HP 3000 goes much quicker than the HP 3000 that it's emulating is a bit lame, I think. Consider if a third party vendor had released a utility that made a Tier 1 A-Class run 2-3 times quicker, or HP as a final gesture of good will had uncrippled them, or in fact had continued with HP 3000 development and introduced faster Tier 1 processors. Whilst there may have been a few companies disappointed that they couldn't extract more revenue, the bottom line is that it would have still been Tier 1 hardware. Others may disagree, but I maintain that a given piece of software has no more intrinsic value when running on faster hardware.

User Licensed Software that used MPE User Count restrictions is a different matter, as moving to 7.5 means unlimited user counts. I expect there will be some interesting discussions on this topic.

Whilst with my migration vendor hat on, the "CHARON-HPA/3000" emulator is likely to be disruptive technology as companies reassess their medium/long-term strategies. As we also use and support customers who had no plans to migrate from the HP 3000, it is good to see this solution becoming available.

It's impressive what Stromasys have done. I am looking forward to playing with an HPa3000 in the not-too-distant future.

Frequently Asked Questions on the Emulator

One rousing surprise from the HP3000 Reunion was a demonstration of the CHARON HPA/3000 emulator by Craig Lalley, a veteran MPE/iX and consulting expert called in to smooth the emulator onto the 3000's OS. Lalley ran the emulator off his laptop. In the weeks since that late-September demo, Lalley has been answering customer-posed questions. Here's an in-progress FAQ on what CHARON will offer by the start of next year.

(ScreenJet's Alan Yeo has also answered questions based on his study of the demonstration; one reply is included below. A longer discourse from Yeo examines prospects for license interpretations.) Lalley began with an overview.

The emulator recreates PA-RISC architecture in software. What this means is that I take a raw disk image (bit by bit copy) of a working HP 3000 system. I then transfer that file to my laptop. If the disk is 9GB it will be a 9GB image. If it is an 18GB disk, the end result is an 18GB file. Currently the system needs to be running MPE 7.5. The version of 7.5 we've used is current on patches.

The emulator starts at an ISL> prompt. It takes approximately 2 minutes and 30 seconds for MPE to boot to a colon prompt. From that point on the system is solid. I can compile, run FSCHECK, stream jobs, and block mode works. I have worked on every model of HP 3000 from the Series 3 to an N-Class 750 8-CPU system. Now, I can boot MPE on my laptop. I find that amazing.

Does the emulator support HPSUSAN numbers?

It does indeed support the HPSUSAN number. It is the number that exists on each Stromasys USB license key. The vendors I have talked to have been very excited about the emulator. Several have offered demo copies, so I can test them in the new environment.

Can I run an emulator with an existing MPE/iX license from my old system?

HP is supporting a license transfer of MPE from the retiring 3000 system to the new emulator.

Is the current performance closer to A400, or a dual-core A500-200-14? The emulator needs a Core-i7, so would the best comparison would be the RP2600? Or does it run faster than a 99x?

The first release will only support a single processor. I would expect the first version to be around the performance of a 979 single 180-MHz processor. I am  running performance tests and will be happy to share the results when they are more complete.

In the prior Stromasys emulators (for VAX and PDP) it takes two cores to run a single emulated processor. One core is doing real-time direct instruction translation, to support the emulated processor (in this case, the PA-RISC processor). The overhead may indeed be 3:1, considering peripherals, because the SCSI bus is also emulated in the software.

The move to multiple processors will happen, but reaching the performance of an N-Class 750 is going to take some time.

Would a good SSD storage device get you beyond A-Class performance?

My guess is an SSD would only really help at boot time. My bet is there would be some slowness to the emulated SCSI interface.

What number of users would this PC architecture handle?

That is a question that can only be answered by heavy stress testing. I will post my results. Currently there are some issues with the network that need to be resolved.

(Alan Yeo) Theoretically, as many as MPE will -- as it's running MPE and the architecture being emulated is PA-RISC. However, I suspect you mean how many concurrent users will the horsepower of the emulator support. In which case the answer is "it depends on what applications you're running."

It will be a growing number as the emulation is tuned and moved from the current A-Class performance towards that of an N-Class. By the time it is ready for deployment, I would expect it to be significantly quicker than it is today.

However, if you are on a maxed out N-Class you may have to wait a long time. One tidbit I picked up at the Reunion is that whilst the software has been migrated and is running perfectly, the current biggest HP-UX Itanium server can't quite handle the maximum number of concurrent users that an HP 3000 can.

What are the requirements for the PC?

Stomasys will have its own PC as an option. The goal is to minimize configurations in the beginning. This will probably change as requirements/performance goes up. Currently a core i7 chip is required, because the emulator utilizes the SSE4 instruction set.

If your PC dies (anything that would have been a reload situation on a real HP 3000) do you get up and running faster on the Stromasys emulator than a reload would have taken on a real HP 3000? 

The emulator works with VMWare, so snapshots are supported. There is a plan to fully support ESXi 4.1. Stromasys is very committed to VMWare.

Are private volumes and big disk arrays supported?

I have not tested private volumes yet, due to an issue with the SCSI interface. But I intend to.

Is the architecture compiler-agnostic: BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, SPL, etc ?

In theory, you could compile on the emulator and move the object code to a real HP 3000.

I've written 99 percent of the software at my site, mostly in BASIC. Has there been any testing with Apache and CGIs or Samba?

I have not tested Apache or Samba due to some current limitations.

How are printers addressed?

Printers should work just like today: 1) through a DTC, or 2) through network printing.

Is the emulator freeware?

No, the Stromasys Charon HPA/3000 is a product for purchase from Stromasys.

Stromasys has an NCE (Non-Commercial and Educational) version of RSX-11, OpenVMS and Tru64 UNIX for hobbyist and educational use (which doesn't include their proprietary acceleration technology). Have they said if there will be a NCE version of HPA/3000? If 'yes' have they mentioned a likely price?

I am absolutely looking into that. I don't have an answer yet, but I will pass it along as soon as I know.

Ritchie's rich legacy: Unix both vital, hated

One week exactly after the death of Steve Jobs, Unix co-creator Dennis Ritchie died Oct. 12 of prostate cancer at age 70. In addition to creating Unix at Bell Labs along with Ken Thompson (above), Ritchie is credited with creating the first C programming language. The most technical of community members think Ritchie deserved the same outpouring of grief and praise Jobs received. Some writers compared Ritchie to Tesla, who invented AC current versus Edison's Direct Current. Edison died rich. Ritchie died alone.

Ritchie's inventions deserve praise, and he got much of it during his lifetime from his technical peers. But the invention of C and Unix had as checkered a past as anything Jobs and Apple sold, and a more caustic effect on better-designed inventions. The HP 3000 community in particular suffered from the snake oil of Unix. A better friend to the 3000 has been Ritchie's C -- and not coincidentally, it's that language that's still making magic that 3000s can use.

You can smell that snake oil burning when you read this week's post from Google's Rob Pike, a colleague of Ritchie's and the first man to report Ritchie's death.

Unix was the great equalizer, the driving force of the Nerd Spring that liberated programming from the grip of hardware manufacturers. The hardware didn't matter any more, since it all ran Unix. And since it didn't matter, hardware fought with other hardware for dominance; the software was a given.

Bell Labs was the industry tower that Pike patrolled in the late 1980s, and that certainly wasn't any province close to an HP lab or a 3000 development cubicle or a company's IT director office. Unix was no more of a given than "spoken language" means "something everyone can understand." Unix remains full of byzantine differences that made the hardware more important than ever, because every vendor sold theirs as the One True Unix. Especially HP, which fed 3000 customers into the Unix ovens while it cooked up a larger installed base for HP-UX. The only thing that was a given was that HP was giving away its customers to Unix, while the world was climbing the shaky rope ladder into Windows. Ritchie was writing an "anti-forward" to a notable book exposing fatal flaws in his creation.

The point here is that technology has always been essential to a product's success and the health of its inventing company. But without insight, passion and a drive to create customer appetites and loyalty, technology like Unix can become the DC of electric service. You won't see much kowtowing to Unix this fall, since it's been eclipsed and outclassed by Linux. The Ubuntu version of Linux will actually save some 3000 customers from the fate of those 1990s ovens. But it took more than 20 years of refinements to make something a given: hardware, now replaced by virtualized servers like the CHARON product for the 3000.

Unix meant HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, Tru64, Ultrix, Xenix, IRIX, A/UX (sold by the non-Jobs Apple) and countless more. Unix was such a rabbit warren by the middle 90s that one of its chief makers, Sun, created Java to bind all software together in "write once, run everywhere." That didn't turn out to be any truer than Unix being a force Ritchie created to spark all digital inventions, including Apple's.

Unix might be the only operating system ever to sprout a Hater's Handbook, one widely cherished by those who worked with the OS and now such a legend you can read it for free, after multiple printings by IDG Press. "The Best of the UNIX-HATERS Online Mailing List Reveals why UNIX Must Die!" To be fair, people might have derided Apple's Newton just as much. But the Newton never killed off worthy achievements in technology. And that is what's being stated here: An invention in technology is more praiseworthy than a successful product and company.

Just try telling that to an HP 3000 expert or owner, now looking for work or hoping for a replacement. Ritchie is deserving of the Turing Award, the US National Medal of Technology, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, and the Japan Prize. He was also honest enough to know what he'd invented was far from a magic catalyst. "UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity," he said. He started to inch closer to Jobs' hubris while saying that "C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success." Quirky would be generous for the language both Tymlabs and CCC tried to sell to the HP 3000 market in the 80s and 90s. C needed "lint," another of those four-or-less lettered Unix tools, to find all the bugs in a typical program.

Ritchie deserves a memorial, but working in technology's high towers won't summon the sorrows of flowers laid at doorsteps of Apple Stores. There are fine ones written to assay his genius at the New York Times, the Guardian and many more outlets. On that Hater's Handbook cover, Clifford Stoll said "The next time a UNIX addict tries to intimidate you, reach for this book." Intimidation was rife among the Unix acolytes. The next time an acolyte tries to tell you that Jobs was a mere pitchman while Ritchie was an underpraised genius, consider what each has left behind that is working as their companies built it, and what they were doing in the year that they died. We stand on lots of people's shoulders to make tech magic serve us. Nobody is perfect, but the carping about Ritchie oversight versus Jobs belittles both men. Ask HP 3000 customers. Great tech needs a great advocate to survive.

Why Your Life's Work Deserves Praise

The news wires are full of praise and remembrances of Steve Jobs today, the first working morning since he passed away. Billions of people never used Apple products, however. Some swear they never will, just because they don't want to get sucked into Apple's sparkly universe.

But as a computer professional, you might consider how admired and revered your skills were by Jobs and his company. A 90-second video on YouTube shows an interview of a boyish Steve Jobs who is explaining why the computer is the greatest tool ever created by mankind. Because, he says, it's the bicycle for our minds. That's a sentiment that goes a long way in the NewsWire offices, considering how much time we're in the saddle to stay fit, or to help fundraise for surivors of cancer, or AIDS.

Jobs was also plainspoken about stealing to create great products. The HP 3000's MPE bedrock was mined out of the Burroughs operating system, something that Allegro's Stan Sieler likes to remind us. Windows, of course, came straight off the Mac and now represents the most popular migration platform for 3000 owners. 

In another YouTube interview Jobs admits how theft propelled Apple. But he also reminds us that it's thievery with a heritage of beauty. "It comes down to exposing yourself to the best things that humans have done -- and then trying to bring those things into what you're doing," he said. If you ever felt like your developments for this "bicycle of the mind" should be considered as art, the "Good artists copy" 30-second interview is worth a look, too.

This morning, here in the offices where we're peeking into our 17th year of publication of the NewsWire, we're teary eyed. We've lost a genius on the level of Edison or Disney -- the latter especially so, considering that Steve Jobs died as the largest shareholder of Disney. But honor the memory of one who always allowed that death was the greatest change agent of all, because it sweeps away and clears room for something newer. His passing is a day of mourning for us, because from the earliest days of our publishing careers, Apple products have been our greatest tools. Thanks to people like yourselves, they are our swift and stylish bicycles of the mind.