Encompass, Euro Interex, ITUG Connect users

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Encompass, Euro Interex, ITUG Connect users

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When COBOL heat lights up the future

One year ago this month, Micro Focus announced its purchase of its most prevalent COBOL competitor for 3000 sites, Acucorp. The Micro Focus juggernaut was righting itself after a discouraging era that saw profits and revenues falling. Acucorp had built a successful solution of a COBOL compiler for HP 3000 sites in migration. AcuCOBOL is built to mimic the 3000's HP COBOL II as closely as possible with something created outside HP's labs.

After that $40 million purchase of Acucorp, Micro Focus reported today that is has gone on to set a record for yearly revenue, beating its "Drive to $225 (Million)" sales goal. Now the owner of two-thirds of the COBOL choices for HP 3000 sites will be purchasing NetManage, another $25 million spent to get into a business allied with IT enterprise operations. NetManage sells software "to transform core applications into new Web-based business solutions."

Two years ago, Micro Focus pursued an old, familiar business solution as its new management's goal. In simple terms, stemming the loss of business revenue was Job One. Legacy platforms were the primary means for the solution.

"The primary focus of the new management team is to continue to restore the business to achieve significant, sustainable, profitable growth and to enhance shareholder confidence over time," CEO Stephen Kelly said back then. After two years of buying businesses at a cost that's almost 50 percent of 2006 Micro Focus revenues, it looks like Micro Focus is making progress on the business it desired: Restoration of the Micro Focus operations. Stock traded about $250 a share on May 5.

It took COBOL revenues to make this restoration a reality. Clearly this is a compiler technology that still produced heat, since billions upon billions of lines of COBOL run the world's business. Buying ownership of newer technology is one thing that a company can do with its success in legacy offerings. COBOL for 3000 migrators comes from individual suppliers like Micro Focus. But a move away from it is just as possible as the Micro Focus drive to solutions not tied to COBOL. An HP 3000 software vendor is working on a design that not only leaves Micro Focus out of the picture, but in time erases the need for COBOL altogether.

The other one-third of COBOL choices, Fujitsu NetCOBOL, differs from both Micro Focus products. AcuCOBOL and Micro Focus are interpreted implementations of compilers. According to QSS founder Duane Percox, whose company is migrating its K-12 HP 3000 application to other platforms, "we felt we had less control with those compilers than a compiler like Fujitsu NetCOBOL, which is a native compilation."

Maybe even more important to the migrating customer, Fujitsu's COBOL has no run-time fees.

But even while QSS is using NetCOBOL, its longer-term goals include eliminating as much vendor-controlled technology as possible. Ruby is open source. "Ruby is a standalone object oriented program scripting language," Percox said. "A goal of our Ruby exploration is to begin to replace the COBOL with Ruby wherever it makes sense." QSS has COBOL in all of its software implementations, from the MPE/iX version to HP-UX to Linux.

A former HP 3000 lab expert, Jeff Vance, joined QSS this year for just this kind of technology exploration. The aim of the project is similar to what Micro Focus is buying with $25 million in cost cuts and COBOL growth: a Web application foundation. QSS is employing "the use of Ruby as a general purpose language for any number of things (not necessarily Web based)," Percox said, "and when I say Rails I am really saying 'Ruby on Rails' which is the framework for Web applications."

Cutting down lagging products is important in the Micro Focus kind of business formula, because you need the money from somewhere to make the big purchases. It can be the kind of model where design elegance and customer loyalty can't hold a candle to growth's bright light. HP 3000 customers might recall how vital growth was to an HP that had to cut out the 3000 from future plans. Kelly remains at the CEO desk at Micro Focus, a UK company which trades only on the London Stock Exchange. Two years ago he said

Tough action has been taken in regard to costs, the benefits of which we expect to flow through to operating profits in FY2007. Returning to sustainable revenue growth is the key factor that will determine the long term success of the Company. And while I believe we have broadly arrested the decline, our revenue outlook remains cautious as we stabilise and focus the business.

QSS gathers another 3000 HP expert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matchbox-ing up for Tech Forum

A national user group conference rolls out with bigger expectations than a regional meeting. The recent GHRUG International Technology Conference offered a swell networking cookout at an extended stay hotel's pool as its social event. Encompass, as well as sponsor vendor HP, is lining up its own social event with an international flair.

On the final day of HP Tech Forum discount registration, Encompass announced that Matchbox Twenty will be playing a mini-concert at the show's final evening, June 19. We're a bit short of enough hipster cred to appreciate the band's stature. But Encompass assured everyone that the group is "one of the most successful bands to emerge in the past decade." They're not stretching at all to say that. iTunes reviewers assure us that over the last decade the band has "earned five Grammy nominations and had more number one hits that nay other artist in the Adult Top 40 radio history."

Interex, the now-defunct HP user group, used to book talent nearly as well-known, but aimed at a somewhat older audience. But the Interex stars were keynoters, the likes of Dave Barry, Scott Adams (Dilbert) and Al Franken (Saturday Night Live). Top-line talent draws the crowds to a user event, another kind of curb appeal as if the Las Vegas venue wasn't enough.

Those larger crowds could deliver a key networking contact for attendees, the ones learning more about HP's alternatives to the HP 3000. Plus, the band makes a better value of the $1,495 entry fee. Matchbox Twenty concert packages for close-up seats start at $250 a ticket. Last year's Tech Forum band was Train, which has won a Grammy but can't boast the same producer as Matchbox Twenty's Steve Lillywhite — who's produced albums for the Rolling Stones and U2.

After playing the Tech Forum, it's on to dates like the North Dakota State Fair, but the band's success need never be matched up, so to speak, on the basis of where they play. Making music in Minot, ND is just a way to appeal to the mainstream.

As for the Tech Forum discounts available from Monday onward, it's strictly the $200 off the full $1,695 package for being an Encompass member. Register at the conference Web site, and book your return flight for Friday if you're counting on Matchbox Twenty.

Checking out the Contributed Software Library

When the HP 3000 first nurtured its community, the computer pros contributed software for one another. This sharing first took place in the 1970s, an era long before open source when only academics exchanged work without payment. For more than two decades the 3000 community created the Contributed Software Library, programs written and fostered in the computers of user group Interex.

More than two years have passed since Interex passed away. The user group's assets have been dissected, calculated and disbursed, but the CSL was not on any trustee's list. Interex never owned these programs, only the collective mass of them on a single tape or selected from one data store.

Now the community is looking for what it contributed. Charles Shimada, a volunteer whose hard work kept Interex computers running at many a conference, was holding the archives of the CSL when Interex melted down. He's willing to share any particular CSL program, so long as a 3000 user can ask for it by name.

Except for a few programs created and contributed by HP 3000 engineers at Boeing, the whole of the CSL is now available. How to get a program is a process with several solutions. Shimada said if anyone wants a contribution from the CSL, he will try to supply it in a store to disc format.

Craig Lalley, a former member of the Interex CSL committee, wonders that if Interex is now a non-entity — and indeed, the CSL looks abandoned — then who could sue for damages if the software programs were released

OpenMPE is ready to host this collection of contributed programs, accessible from a Web server. A collection of this kind of contributed software is already available on the servers at 3k Associates.

HP converts MPE/iX to social net app

In a responsible effort to recycle more than 30 years of programming code, Hewlett-Packard has decided to re-purpose MPE/iX as a social networking application. The news we received from a usually reliable source reports that HP has been searching for an appropriate future for the HP 3000 operating system for more than seven years. Executives have hit on a new social network as an ideal mission for the 33-year-old software.

"We're reaching to become more popular with customers younger and less gray than the 3000 community," said HP spokesman Ben E. Fitforeyou. "This MPE/iX software isn't going anywhere unless we do something about it, and HP is willing to take its chances and charge into the future. We see MPE/iX as a way to bring thousands of computer professionals together for significant social interchange."

A coalition of user groups and advocacy boards, including the DEL/3000 Special Interest Group, the New Wave Association, and HP's Business Report Writers, have agreed to be a test bed for the MPE/iX revision. A core of HP's retired 3000 developers are rolling up their sleeves on the technological transformation, expected to be completed by December of 2010.

"There's a big change a-brewing for MPE/iX," said D. David Brown, the development leader directing the core team from Montange d'Mystere, Switzerland. "I've been waiting more than 20 years for something as important as this."

Demise depends on point of view

AICS Research has rolled out an evolutionary version of the company's QueryCalc HP 3000 product. Founder Wirt Atmar announced the new product, QCReports, in a posting over the HP 3000 newsgroup. You can download and install a version 0.98 copy from the product's Web page, aics-research.com/qcreports

QCReports runs on any system which supports Marxmeier Software's Eloquence database: HP-UX, Windows or Linux. The software has been 95 percent rebuilt on Windows from the QueryCalc code, Atmar said. In an extensive post to the newsgroup he explained the evolution of the product and how it can help an HP 3000 site migrate to another platform

Although there are an enormous number of PC  manufacturers, there’s really only one system, and I very much believe in Bill Gates' plans for World Domination. Because of that belief, the newest version of  QueryCalc, which we now call QCReports, was translated onto the PC.

However, in that post you'll see another viewpoint from Wirt, who has logged many hours as an advocate for the HP 3000 and IMAGE. The HP 3000 died in 2001, he says, and so QCReports had to take up QueryCalc's mantle for AICS. But Wirt showed curiousity about any interest in a 3000 version of the product, too, a broad-minded view in the wake of an obituary.

The question: Is there any interest (meaning money) in us putting together host code for the HP 3000 and  IMAGE? I estimate that it would only take us a couple of months (in the  Atmarian Calendar) to get it up and running on the HP 3000. We already have all of the database query code written for the HP 3000. It’s only a matter of rewriting it for the new communications protocols.

The death of a system is a serious matter for anyone who's invested so much in it across so many years. But I disagree with the time of death, or even the current prognosis for how long the 3000 can survive.

To make my point about the premature 3000 obituary, I go back to Wirt's point in a subsequent message, when he responded to the mess we see in the Windows world, post-XP.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of this business is the tendency of people to exaggerate, to try to protect whatever nook and cranny they’re comfortable in, rather than look at the situation as the way things are.

“The way things are” is not an empirical, unassailable point of view for the 3000 community. As Alfredo Rego said in his keynote at the recent GHRUG conference, there are many perspectives for the HP 3000 users to use in viewing their world. Wirt builds software from the viewpoint that the 3000 is long dead. IT pros who advise on 3000s like Michael Anderson of J3K Solutions see a Windows world that grows more deadly and blinding with each release. Calling Windows a way for Microsoft to suck more life-blood, he says of Microsoft's product strategy

With every new release of the Bill Gates platform, (from Win 3.x, (95/98/me), 2000, XP, and now Vista) end users and developers experience something similar to a blind man having his furniture rearranged.

Meanwhile, Shawn Gordon and Craig Lalley used their messages to the group to assay alternative solutions and compare the 3000’s successful designs with younger products on the Windows platform.

Is the 3000 dead? Is Windows a life-blood-sucking platform? Does all of this Windows enterprise design remind you of something you bought for your HP 3000 10 years ago? If your answers are yes, no, and yes, you find yourself looking through a migrated perspective. If the answers are yes, yes and yes, you might be in the middle of a Windows migration. And if the answers are no, yes, and no, you see homesteading as the way to view the future. Lots of nooks for lots of reasons.

The nook and cranny I am comfortable in is obvious: historic, legacy in the sense of legendary, and realistic about the ultimate demise of everything we hold dear. Prepare for death and the life that follows. You will know when death arrives, so don’t worry on that score. I just believe it’s still too early to write that obituary for the HP 3000, even while creating alternative solutions for the problems which that great platform continues to solve.

But boy, if anyone can move a product from MPE/iX to Windows better than AICS, I’d sure like to see them try. Especially in keeping the 3000 hosting capabilities inside the evolved product, like QCReports does.

On the other hand, QCReports does have potential for the 3000 user who's not migrating, either at this time or at any time. Wirt summed up his original posting,

On one hand you might ask why spend any money on a dead platform, and that’s certainly a reasonable question. But on the other, if you’re intending on staying with MPE for a little while longer, QCReports would be a way to significantly upgrade and modernize your capabilities with the HP 3000. And, if and when you do migrate, if you move to a platform which Eloquence supports, your total migration time for your database and reports will honestly be only a one or two hours. Other than changing the IP address of the new host, you’ll never notice a single difference.

A new conference on the horizon

Three weeks from today, the HP Technology Forum becomes a little more expensive item on HP professionals' itinerary. The early bird registration discount ends on April 18, about two months before the mid-June meeting of HP and its customers, partners and employees.

Encompass and the ITUG user groups have been the driving forces for content in the conference, and the meeting's Expo floor generates revenues for the groups. The need to attend the Technology Forum will seem greatest to the HP 3000 site doing a migration, since almost all of the seminar content and confidential disclosure briefings address non-3000 solutions.

Some HP 3000 community partners will be exhibiting on the Expo floor. At the left you'll see (with an added click for detail) the overall agenda for the four days of meetings and networking, so you can start planning your travel. But at the moment there's no evidence of specific HP 3000 content scheduled for the June 16-19 conference. There's plenty to learn about HP's Unix, or Windows, or even OpenVMS — although that last environment isn't on the destination list for many 3000 users who are sticking with HP in their migrations.

Nevertheless, the June meeting presents the world's largest computer company in all of its enterprise glory, a meeting devoted to operating and improving computer user experience on the target platforms HP wants to sell its 3000 customers. The final word on the proposed consolidation of four HP user groups will also take stage in Las Vegas.

The discount for registering for the Forum by April 18 is "your choice of $100 gift certificate to HPShopping.com or HP's Logo Store." The HP shopping Web site offers desktops and notebooks among its most enterprise-oriented products (but nary a computer ships with anything other than Windows Vista, an OS gaining more problems with its first Service Pack release.) You can put your $100 toward a flatscreen TV for the executive boardroom, though. Joining Encompass earns you a discount off the $1,695 full conference pass, or off the $695 day pass, but the Encompass member discount doesn't have a deadline.

A new poll has popped up on the Encompass Web site about the top reasons which are luring people to the event:

Technical Education     65%
Networking Opportunities     52%
Hands-on Technical Labs     38%
Pre-conference Seminars     29%
The Technology Expo     29%
Advocacy Opportunities     15%
Keynotes by HP Executives     18%
Discounted Onsite Certification Testing     13%
Chapters & Special Interest Group Events     11%

Of all the attractions listed, the final one will reveal the new name for the consolidated user group.

Without much in the way of conference session specifics, we're left to learn that that Mark Hurd, HP Chairman and CEO; Ann Livermore, Executive VP TSG; and Randy Mott, Executive VP and CIO will be speakers. It's early in the registration process, so early that the space on the Expo floor is still being sold by Encompass user group management partner Smith Bucklin.

HP user groups crank up consolidation

Encompass and its allied user groups offered specifics on the consolidation of four groups, a move the groups have scheduled for April pending member approval. Encompass, the Tandem ITUG user group, HP Interex Europe and the Pacific Rim outpost of Encompass want to become a single entity.

As a single group, the entity that's being called Endeavor hopes to attract more notice and cooperation from Hewlett-Packard and offer a better package of benefits to its members. Encompass president Nina Buik hopes the consolidation will make Endeavor more attractive to younger members of the HP IT professional community.

But first comes the vote on the consolidation, scheduled for "soon" in a message to user group members. In order to inform its electorate, Encompass pointed to an "Agreement and Plan of Consolidation", a legal document that Encompass posted online for members to review prior to the upcoming vote. You don't have to be a current member of any of the user groups to look at the plan; just head to the new Endeavor site to review the document.

Only user group members will be asked to vote, however. But they'll have a clear view of what the user groups need them to approve.

The consolidated group's site also has recorded Webcast presentations and an FAQ file, but the message of this week highlighted several plans for the new group:

Board of Directors: The Board of Directors slate for the new organization will include current board members from each of the three organizations that were chosen to represent their respective members. These trusted individuals have demonstrated exemplary service and dedication to their communities and are considered qualified to serve as Directors of the new organization. The bylaws detail the Board positions and terms as well as the various committees and subgroups.

New Organization Name: There are name recommendations under consideration that are currently undergoing a trademark search process. This due diligence will have a bearing on the name that is eventually chosen. Therefore, the new organization's proposed name is not included within the Agreement and Plan of Consolidation, but will be finalized for the intended launch at the HP Technology Forum & Expo 2008 in June.

Membership Dues Structure: The membership structure and fees are detailed in the document for both basic individual membership and corporate membership. Basic individual membership will be US$50 and an additional fee for the Connection magazine subscription. Should the new organization be approved, current memberships with Encompass will be honored with the new organization.

The many views of your community

Adager's Alfredo Rego covered a broad swath of subjects at the recent GHRUG International Technology Conference. His keynote talk ranged from "parables" of Ford executives who had no user experience with the cars they designed and marketed, to the Bank of America founder — whose said his lending requirements began with "people whose character I trust."

Each story seemed to have some connection to the life of a 3000 user in the Transition Era, and one section of Rego's talk addressed the many ways to view HP's 3000 profile these days, as well as views of the community.

"It is something which can be viewed from many different angles," he said. "There is HP's high perspective. The lowly user perspective. The vendor perspective." Each segment went onto the chalkboard behind him in a room where students received instruction. At that moment, Rego could be viewed in a teacher's perspective.

"HP wants to send one message that won't confuse," he said. "There are also many perspectives of users, such as those who couldn't wait for HP to get out of the market in 2001, to provide a reason for them to move away from the 3000, using hired guns."

Rego drew a link back to his Bank of America parable, in which the founder knew his customer community from a "rubber meets the road" perspective. With the sub-prime debacle caused by outside management as a modern day allegory, Rego reminded the GHRUG  attendees about the security of using a close-up perspective.

"Whenever you get hired guns, managing things they have no clue about, all hell breaks loose," he said. Not that HP has nothing but hired guns managing its relations with this community, of course. "I have had the pleasure of working with very technical people at the lowest possible bits and bytes level HP since 1974," he said.

The pleasure seemed to fade further up HP's management line. "I was frightened when I spoke to HP's managers some time ago and asked them, 'Have you run an HP 3000 application?' I said oh boy, this is the beginning of the end. That is something to keep in mind, because it is pretty predictable."

Setting hooks for migration via replacement

In a continuation of our Q&A interview with MB Foster's chairman Birket Foster, we asked what issues a replacement migration sparks for 3000 sites. His firm is one of two HP Platinum Migration partners still active out of an initial four (Speedware is the other). After six years of delivering advice on the migration, he had plenty to share.

What have you seen at the 3000 site which needs to replace an application, rather than adopt a system from a corporate parent?

   We’ve been on many sites where we’ve helped customers through the software selection process. We look at what kind of items would be mandatory, then nice-to-haves, and build a matrix across software choices so they can compare apples to apples.

Does your company, as a Platinum Migration partner, give away to the community some of what you know and have learned?

   We certainly help coach people through things, especially through our series of seminars and Webinars. Our basic criteria these days is to make sure the business side is involved. You have to have someone from the senior management team who can okay a budget. To give you an example of costs, in the small and medium businesses they think it’s $13,000 a seat all in. If you have 50 people, that racks up pretty quick.

   You have to end up talking to senior management because there’s a business fit as well as an IT fit. In the absence of that, you’re just grading things against what IT thinks they should be. Frankly, the application runs the business, and IT just provides the wheels underneath it.

How many migrating sites consider the share of budget that Windows requires?

    There are lots of people who have never managed where they spend their money. There is some consciousness-raising going on. There’s also the possibility that the senior management team doesn’t understand what their investment in IT should be.

   So we’ve been doing some work in the area of application portfolio management, so people can understand how a portfolio of applications that run a company can be evaluated. So people can understand how to plan their investments in IT.

How busy is your migration service staff today? In the past the Platinum partners had expertise still on the bench.

   Now they’re all actively working here, and in fact we’re hiring additional members into the team. Everybody’s busy, and we’re probably running a dozen migrations.

Does your hiring extend to people with 3000 expertise?

    It’s more likely to be domain expertise, where somebody knows the healthcare industry or they know the manufacturing industry well. That’s more important than specific application knowledge on an HP 3000. Unless they’re the person chosen to hold the fort while everybody else goes off and starts up the new application.

   In a case of someone who could look after an application and make sure that it ran smoothly, so it would free up the current staff so they could work on the new app, that might be a situation where we would hire someone on the 3000 side.

   For a large part of this, the application is being replaced by something off the shelf. So quite frankly, the 3000 skill sets aren’t going to help. Things like understanding COBOL and how to compile it, FORTRAN, Pascal and C++, all of those things might be handy.

Replacement projects like that sometimes have to hurdle the use of very specific HP 3000 software, right?

   Yes, there are tools that have been used in the HP 3000 environment in creative ways. The trouble with having somebody MacGyver something is that it’s really hard to find the equivalent in a new environment. Part of the process is always to survey how people used what third party tools, what they were using, what did they write themselves — and then understand how the entire environment works with the entire corporation. And perhaps with trading partners on the supply side and the demand side.

Do you sometimes have to encourage training in a new solution to get those MacGyver-isms replaced?

    In some cases they have no idea what it actually does. The problem is that the guy who wrote it is long gone. The current folks don’t know what’s there, or why it’s there. They just pray that it keeps running.

You’re one of the most prolific presenters at HP 3000 conferences and community meetings. Would it be fair to say that the overall message of these presentations is “There may be many points to consider which you’re not yet aware of?”

   We’ve been helping people move data since 1985. We’ve been in this business a very long time, and it only got formalized six years ago. We’ve learned a ton of stuff along the way for things that are going to bite people. It’s called wisdom, and wisdom comes from experience — and experience can come from doing it wrong once.

Is your business starting to trend toward services being the larger part of what you do for the community?

   I think migrations, and the sale of migration tools which do include some of our own software tools, will be a bigger part of the business this year than they have been in the past. I expect they will cross the line and become the larger part of the business.

    People are starting to recognize in their own organizations that the ability to support an application, do any major modifications, all of those things are becoming more difficult. The customers are doing an evaluation to see if their application operations are sustainable. “How will we train the next person?” When people start asking those kinds of questions, they’re quite surprised sometimes. Like finding spreadsheets which run a department, but have nothing to do with an IT department, but probably should have.

   The informal stuff is what you need to find in your organization, these rogue applications. When we’re engaged to work with a customer, there is a mandate to understand the departmental applications and operations.

Landing new ideas for 3000 users

Birket Foster is not running for election this spring, but he is campaigning for some new ideas. The founder of MB Foster, he’s stood on both the homesteading and migration avenues for more than six years — and as he likes to point out, much longer when you consider moving data as a migration.

    This week the OpenMPE group which Foster has chaired since its 2002 inception announced election results, looking for volunteer help to get HP’s agreement on source code licensing. But the scope of Foster advocacy and business reaches well beyond software, stepping into services in a big enough way that it will soon overtake software at his company. That says something about a supplier who’s been selling 3000 solutions so long.

   With an election on hand and services heating up, we figured Birket — one of those community members known best by his first name — would have something to say about the new 3000 opportunities and persistent challenges. We talked to him in the week before February’s election, on his cell while he traveled to a customer site.

Some in the 3000 community are wondering why, more than five years into the Transition Era, OpenMPE is having another election of its board. Can your volunteers make a difference, so long after HP sparked customers to migrate?

    Our work for now is to make HP realize there is going to be a presence of people who will be there, after HP leaves.

Are there enough members in OpenMPE for HP to consider putting MPE into the hands of the community?

   HP will never put MPE in the hands of the community. They will only put it in the hands of someone who will be qualified to manage and maintain the source code — which is the whole purpose of OpenMPE, becoming that group.

Is there any chance of HP selecting OpenMPE as that group?

    Absolutely. We’ve talked about doing a mini-project up front, like soon just to prove ourselves, so HP gets a fire drill on what it’s like to do a patch without people internal to HP. And they haven’t done a patch in the last little bit, right?

So what does a mini-project look like?

   Oh, you’d find something that needs to be changed, you’d make a specification, and you’d sit with a contractor and say what you need them to do. There’s no reason why OpenMPE can’t be those guys. The talent that has put their names forward to be part of the group to do development is rock-solid.

So the OpenMPE mission will certainly consist of services. The 3000 community’s market seems to be turning toward services now, especially from the well-known vendors which the customers rely upon. What’s MB Foster doing today to expand services in addition to its product support and migration expertise?

    For some 3000 sites we already provide some services in the area of our specialties, which are dealing with data. We have assisted customers in recruiting people for full-time employment for multi-year contracts in the HP 3000 space — because those people needed staff, and didn’t know where to find them.

This location service costs something for a customer?

   It’s a courtesy for the customers. It helps them out, and they like us, they buy our products, and they get other services from us. In some cases, we’re hosting their data marts, because we do this every day. It’s a lot easier on the customer when they can rely on a data mart team that’s working on a bunch of sites, knows the tools inside out and helped develop them. Most of those are on Windows or HP-UX.

Hosting in this case means having a server running so the customer doesn’t need to run one, or keep staff busy?

   That’s correct. In the long run, hosting is going to be a very important part of how small- and medium-sized business and departmental computing gets done. That’s because the cost for staff these days is five skill sets, although you might find them in as few as three people. That means your staffing cost is going to be $300,000 to $800,000 in order to get the right people involved. That’s quite a bit of money, so a lot of divisions would rather buy part of someone’s time, knowing that person is an expert and will do exactly what’s needed.

This kind of expertise, is it beginning to leave the industry?

   Retirement is an issue, both the retirement of end-user experts as well as the technical experts. The end-user experts are as important, or even more important, than the technicians. Once the application is running, so long as someone can follow the script for daily, weekly and monthly processes, it’s not a big deal. But when they go in and lose an end-user, it takes awhile to train a new one. Many times what that end user who’s been there a long time hasn’t been written down anywhere.

By end-user expert, you mean someone who’s well-versed in how to run an in-house application?

    Not just in-house, but any application that runs the business. Take a look at what’s happened to MANMAN. It’s changed hands four times, from ASK to Computer Associates to SSA GT, and now it’s gone to Infor. It’s had multiple owners and definite changes in the way that things are supported and maintained.

    MANMAN is a pretty big manufacturing application for the 3000 community. People are still running it, although not as many as there were, but a lot of them. The challenge with knowing how many is that some of those customers are a division of a larger company — and that larger company doesn’t share the IT plan down to the division level anymore.

HP researches way to make Labs pay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OpenMPE seats two new directors

Candidates Alan Tibbetts of Strobe Data and Walter Murray of the California Dept. of Corrections and Rehabilitation have become new members of the OpenMPE board of directors, while the four incumbent directors who also ran earned a return to their seats. Except for Tibbetts, who will finish out the final year of retiring director Paul Edwards' term, all will serve for two years.

Seven volunteers ran for the six open seats in the election of HP 3000 advocates. OpenMPE has been dedicated to the continued lifespan of the HP 3000 since the group's inception more than six years ago. Keith Wadsworth of Orbit Software raised awareness and pragmatic viewpoints in his campaign, but fell short in the voting between Feb. 11 and Feb. 29.

Six seats were open in this year's election because of the retirement of long-time director Edwards. Incumbent directors all won back another two years of volunteering, a period which will nearly coincide with the end of HP's involvement in the 3000 market. But in the 2006 elections that was also the belief — when volunteers ran for their posts which were expiring this year.

OpenMPE secretary Donna Hofmeister released the vote totals about an hour ago to the OpenMPE mailing list and HP 3000 newsgroup:

Donna Hofmeister    82
Tracy Johnson    77
Walter Murray    70
Alan Tibbetts    67
Matt Perdue        71
John Wolff        70
Keith Wadsworth    43

In spite of the fact that the HP 3000 community is now more than six years beyond HP's exit-the-market announcement, the election drew 89 ballots, an increase of more than 40 percent from last year's voting. More important, the voting attracts new members to OpenMPE.

Organization chairman Birket Foster says that OpenMPE's impact goes well beyond the number of members. "You have to consider the number of systems represented, as well as the size of customer." In its earliest years, the advocacy group began with 125 companies, including "one major aircraft manufacturer," Foster added.

Murray, who worked in HP's 3000 language labs on COBOL II before leaving the company, is an end-user OpenMPE director, still a minority in the nine-member board. John Wolff, Tracy Johnson and Chuck Ciesinski are also end-user/customer volunteers; Wolff and Johnson were re-elected this year. Hofmeister, whose current job is at Long's Drug, and Matt Perdue also returned to the board in this year's voting.

Johnson, Hofmeister, Wadsworth and Perdue all responded to the NewsWire's candidate questions, which we posed on Feb. 21. All of this year's board nominees posted candidate statements at the OpenMPE 2008 election Web page for candidate bios. The page remains online today.

Tibbetts served on the OpenMPE board in the past, a term which ended last year. His employer Strobe Data announced an HP 3000 emulator project in 2004, a long-term effort for which Strobe has set no timetable for release. Emulation of HP 3000 hardware will become a viable option for a vendor only in years to come, according to Strobe's founder Willard West.

Wadsworth made a case for changes to the 3000 community in a February statement, calling out HP for what he sees as a mixed message from the vendor — focused on the Right To Use (RTU) licenses.

We all know the platform was killed six months [after HP's promise to support it in 2001], and therefore users and third-party application providers began developing new business strategies and plans for the remaining life of MPE.

Yet today many of us find ourselves very puzzled. On one hand HP keeps insisting (for over six years now) that the MPE platform is being made obsolete. On the other hand HP seems to be handling MPE as on ongoing business offering with a future by again extending product support and the RTU policy scheme.

OpenMPE answers from some candidates

By this morning, less than 24 hours are left to cast a vote in the OpenMPE election. This year's balloting has already topped last year's voting, but there's still time to make your voice heard. (You should vote at openmpe.org, where you must join first. Membership is free.)

Last week we posed questions to all seven candidates by e-mail, as well as posted them to the OpenMPE and HP 3000 mailing lists. As of yesterday, we had four candidates reply: Keith Wadsworth, and incumbents Matt Perdue, Tracy Johnson, and Donna Hofmeister.

We'd like to tease you with our final question, since it gives the candidates a chance to say what they believe OpenMPE should do right away to let the advocacy group help the community:

Should OpenMPE go after the mission of testing the dozens of beta test patches still stuck inside HP’s 3000 labs? What can the group do to convince HP that the expertise is in place to do that independent testing, and so release HP's improvements and engineering to the full 3000 community?

Keith Wadsworth’s answer: This raises many questions about the needs of the users, and the OpenMPE organization as well. For example, is there any hard data that strongly indicates that a large number of remaining  users, or even a small number, need these patches? I believe the OpenMPE board needs to raise, explore and answer such questions thoroughly. Addressing the question of testing, although the OpenMPE board members and  members at large command considerable expertise, it does not seem apparent  that OpenMPE as a whole has the ability, let alone the infrastructure, to  conduct such testing.

Matt Perdue's answer: OpenMPE has discussed this issue many times and offered to host the beta test patch distribution and result reporting process for HP. Paul Edwards has suggested that HP offer the beta patch test process to the DSPP community, and OpenMPE has the access to the machines necessary to perform this task and the expertise as well. OpenMPE has asked [HP R&D Lab Manager] Ross McDonald to consider having OpenMPE administer the beta patch test process as a “proof of track record” for OpenMPE, and it would help with the business relations between HP and OpenMPE as well.

Tracy Johnson's answer: That would be a perfectly fine goal. I believe the one accomplishment that OpenMPE needs to put under its belt is to get HP to work with us, and not be at odds with each other.  Everything else hinges on this.

Donna Hofmeister's answer: The question on everyone's lips! (see the NewsWire blog story about this).
HP -- we need an answer, we need action. It's time!

Answers to our other four questions:

How soon must HP make a decision about its source code licensing for the 3000’s operating environment? Is it acceptable for the vendor to wait until the start of 2010, as it plans to do now?

Hofmeister: How soon? Yesterday... a year ago... two years ago!  I want MPE's transfer to be a success for all parties. The sooner this process can begin, the better for all concerned.

Wadsworth: It occurs to me that this “decision”  belongs to HP and that it is not the purview of others to presume to tell HP what they must do, let alone how soon.  Having said this, is it possible that HP could well have already made this decision? And that the decision is the source code will not be released?  I believe that the OpenMPE board needs to take this real possibility under consideration and re-evaluate its goals and purposes to best serve the community should the source code not become available.

Perdue: HP in the person of Ross McDonald has made public statements to the HP3000-L and the OpenMPE-L that HP will release responsibility for MPE/iX at some point in the future. I and others on the Board have been holding HP’s feet (well, Ross’ anyway) to the fire on this issue and that’s one of the main reasons I’m running to remain on the Board - I want to continue to press Mr. McDonald to follow through with his (and HP’s) commitments to release MPE/iX to an “outside of HP” company. Mr. McDonald may feel uncomfortable when I “put him on the witness stand and cross examine him” but sometimes that’s necessary.

As to 2010 - no, that is not acceptable. I’ve expressed to Mr. McDonald that the transfer needs to begin NOW, while HP still has the people in place that deal with the processes involved every day, and can pass on that knowledge in a business like and timely manner. I don’t mean the technical ability to do the work, that already exists outside HP; I’m talking about the build and test processes that HP has created over the years that actually create a build or patch release.

Johnson: As a organization with nine people on its board with with little or no funds, I don’t believe it is in our power to tell HP a that they “must” make a decision and have them listen to us.  It is apparent HP cares not one wit whether OpenMPE declares any decision “acceptable” or not, and making such declarations isn’t going to gain any friends at HP. We’re more like a Public TV station that needs a telethon every once in a while to keep us going. But there’s only one donor with the currency (MPE) to make it worthwhile, and that is HP. If we want HP to make that donation, we need to convince HP (our viewership) the donation is worth their while. Otherwise MPE stays permanently on Pay Per View.

What is the one achievement for OpenMPE which the group must accomplish during 2008 — the mission which the group must not fail at?

Hofmeister: The MPE emulation project is gaining traction. OpenMPE will be playing a critical role in this.  I’m hopeful that HP, OpenMPE and the people looking to bring an emulator to market will jointly work out all the details in the coming year.

Wadsworth:  To properly serve the community I believe OpenMPE needs more than one singular achievement goal, and this needs to be more than wishing and hoping to acquire and maintain the MPE  source code. It would seem that supporting a 30+ year old operating system with a shrinking market would be financially very challenging; especially for an organization that publicly states it has no money, no income, and no source of revenue other than limited contributions.  Addressing questions below might be a good place to begin discussing and outlining 2008 target achievements.

Perdue: Getting the license issues for an emulator “in cement.” This has progressed quite well up to this point, and I’m waiting to hear back from Jeff Bandle on a time for a joint meeting with all the interested vendors (U.S. based and Europe) to discuss license issues. Working with Birket Foster I’ve been leading the effort from the OpenMPE side to get the emulator into production, and that process has started. We’ve got a long way to go, but I definitely feel there will be at least one, and I’d prefer two, emulator products for the future.

Johnson: Given the current status of OpenMPE and HP relations, I believe the one accomplishment that OpenMPE needs to put under its belt, is to get HP to work with us, and not be at odds with each other.  Everything else hinges on this.  Although it is a cliché to say “Failure is not an option.”, a failure in 2008 is not a death knell, to parapharse Scarlet O’Hara, “2009 is another year!”

Should third party support providers have access to HP's diagnostics, especially stable storage tools such as ss_update, in case of a system board failure, or the closing of a software company which cannot update licenses (with HPSUSAN numbers) any longer?

Hofmeister: This is another area where I'd love to see some productive conversations occur with HP.  I just can’t stress enough about how quickly time is slipping away. These decisions can’t wait until the last minute.

Wadsworth: Third party companies already have offerings and new offerings are being openly discussed.  OpenMPE needs to be evaluating what can be offered should HP not provide additional access.

Perdue: As others have said, there already exists third party software to address this issue. Prior to things like IRS and “Captain Greb” coming onto the scene, OpenMPE has had many discussions with HP regarding this extremely important issue. HP will not release ss_config for use outside HP, but HP has stated that their field engineers will be able to use ss_config with the guidance of the response center to service customers. HP has also stated the charges for this service is on a time and materials basis. Personally I’d like to see some way for HP to streamline this process to minimize the time it takes to recover a customer to production status when a CPU board swap is necessary. Perhaps one charge for 4 hour response time and another for 24 hour response. Presently it’s only available (as I understand it) on a 24 hour response.

Johnson: HP would have to change its modus operandi to lease those tools. Since such decisions aren’t usually made on a whim, I think the onus would be on the third parties to negotiate such any contract. In the worst case of a post-mortem software company, copies of such tools should be put in an escrow vault that can be purchased by one or more bidders. OpenMPE should encourage such a such decision without being demanding.

HP has expanded its “permissible upgrade” language in its RTU licenses.  Does the vendor need to offer anything to the community to prohibit the  movement of MPE/iX from system to system? Something perhaps like unlocking  the horsepower of the 3000s in the A and N Class?

Hofmeister: Hindsight is 20-20. If times were different, I would like to think that stronger MPE licensing might be something that HP would have done.  But at this point, i don’t foresee hp making this change or doing anything about CPU horsepower.

Wadsworth: “Prohibit the movement” and “unlocking the horsepower” seem to be separate topics, so I will address unlocking the  horsepower.

On first blush this seems like a great idea – making it easier for the remaining  users to increase server performance.  And I am all for it. However, first we  might ask why would HP do this at this time to a product line that has less  than 24 months of HP support? If delivered by HP proper, this type of change  would not only add new breath to the e3000, it would add new life to a  platform that is being shut down.  So because of the unlikelihood of this happening I do not think it is a direction that OpenMPE should concentrate  resources on at this time.

Perdue: OpenMPE has tried numerous times to get HP to consider unlocking the available CPU cycles on A and N class machines. The issue involves the third party software vendors licenses and sales on tier levels, and HP has stated they have no plans to unlock the extra CPU cycles because of third party software license concerns. I’d propose a way should be found that if a site can certify they have only x, y and z third party software and get a certificate from their software vendors, that HP allow the unlocking. After all there are sites that don’t use any third party software that would have tier license issues, and these sites should be able to use their machines fully.

It’s questionable now if HP really could do anything to prevent the movement of MPE/iX to other machines, as they’ve not enforced their copyright literally hundreds to thousands of times, and any good lawyer is going to be able to beat them over the head with that issue and HP would stand a very good chance of loosing their case. In the case of copyrights, if you don’t aggressively move to protect it, you lose it.

Johnson: My first response is “Whaaa?”  “Offering” a “prohibition” seems like a contradiction in terms.  It is like driving to a toll booth, and paying the attendant to keep you off the bridge.  If you know you can’t get on, why drive there? 

Unlocking the HP 3000 systems is another subject entirely. Once you acquire a vehicle you should be able to make mods to the hardware, same goes for computers. Using the same metaphor, some mods may be only allowed in racing venues and may not be street legal. 

Becoming big: a task to grab by the tail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Candidate questions for OpenMPE

Ten days of voting have elapsed in the OpenMPE elections this year, a seven-candidate for six-post race that will end on Feb. 29. Much like the voting in the US primaries so far, the turnout has been higher than in past years. As of tonight 53 ballots have been cast with nine more days left to vote. The entire ballot total in 2007 was 63.

It doesn't cost anything to join OpenMPE and have the right to choose the people who will make the post-HP era of 3000 ownership easier. While we wait out the results, I'd like to pose a few questions to the board candidates. The responses might have some impact on how many community members will vote over the next week-plus, as well as who wins.

1. HP has expanded its "permissible upgrade" language in its RTU licenses. Does the vendor need to offer anything to the community to prohibit the movement of MPE/iX from system to system?  Something perhaps like unlocking the horsepower of the 3000s in the A and N Class?

2. How soon must HP make a decision about its source code licensing for the 3000's operating environment? Is it acceptable for the vendor to wait until the start of 2010, as it plans to do now?

3. What is the achievement for OpenMPE which the group must accomplish during 2008 — the mission which the group must not fail at?

4. Should third party support providers have access to HP's diagnostics, especially stable storage tools, in case of a system board failure, or the closing of a software company which cannot update licenses (with HPSUSAN numbers) any longer?

5. Should OpenMPE go after the mission of testing the dozens of beta test patches still stuck inside HP's 3000 labs? What can the group do to convince HP that the expertise is in place to do that testing, and release the HP improvements and engineering to the full 3000 community?

We'll post these questions to the OpenMPE mailing list, an idea forwarded to us by candidate Donna Hofmeister — with the hope of some answers about what our volunteers want to do for the future of the HP 3000.

Be sure to vote at openmpe.org by next Friday. Don't let March arrive without being heard about the future of using the HP 3000 past 2010. That's not all that unusual, even for companies on the move away from the platform.

HP Q1 results impress analysts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HP intends to take down 3000 certs

In the latest evidence of HP's exit from the 3000 community, Hewlett-Packard has included two HP 3000 certifications among a list of credentials which the vendor plans to cancel on June 1.

HP 3000 advocate Paul Edwards convinced HP to revive these technical certifications during 2006 and 2007, winning back a way to measure MPE/iX skills in a market that is still weathering a loss of expertise. But as Edwards retired from OpenMPE's board, he reported that HP has announced a long list of discontinued certifications for its enterprise products. A lack of desire to achieve or retain a cert may have led HP to its decision.

"The response I had from the certified professionals in the MPE community was very weak when I was working this issue with HP in 2006," Edwards said. "Sad to say, apathy has appeared in many more places in the HP 3000 community.  I don't think HP will change the demise of the two HP 3000 certifications as before."

HP is canceling its Presales HP e3000 Technical Certification and MPE/iX System Administration certificates among a host of cutbacks scheduled for June. In all, 32 certifications will drop off HP's training rolls, including testing and validation for skills in StorageWorks, Alpha servers, and even Superdome consulting and configuration. The retirement of the MPE and 3000 certifications could even impact sites leaving the platform but seeking interim expertise.

Fewer than 60 HP 3000 professionals still held any HP MPE/iX certification as of this year, by Edwards' estimates. HP says all of the credentials will be expired as the end of May, with no other 3000 options open from HP's Americas HP Certified Professional Program. As it has since late 2001, HP labels the servers still running in key companies as "outdated."

These HP credentials are obsolete; either a more up-to-date version exists, or the technology is outdated and is no longer considered valid. If you hold an “Expired” credential and no other valid credentials, you will no longer receive the benefits of being an HP Certified Professional.

For HP 3000 Certified Professionals, these benefits extended to a complimentary MPE/iX release tape — such as the upcoming PowerPatch for MPE/iX 7.5. The benefits at large to a 3000 site, in addition to those from HP, can impact either a homesteading or migrating community member, Edwards said.

I think it depends on their internal technical staff expertise. And, if they need help then a certified person or third party software support would be needed if they don’t have the expertise and need a qualified person. A big problem is the rapidly shrinking MPE talent pool for support people. Also, many HP 3000 people were applications oriented, not internals or highly skilled system managers.

Encompass president Nina Buik said earlier this month that the emerging Endeavor alliance of user groups could take up the HP 3000 certification issue as an advocacy item with HP.

Four weeks away, so register today

It takes an extraordinary amount of effort to mount a user group conference. Even a brief one requires the work of dozens of volunteers. Clearly, meeting in person must have extraordinary benefits.

HP believes this is true of the upcoming conference in Houston. In just four weeks, the Greater Houston Regional Users Group (GHRUG) will host a two-day meeting, March 14-15. This event will meet at the University of Houston Clear Lake Campus, just down the street from the front gates of NASA. There will be two tracks dedicated to the HP 3000 community. The conference also offers three other tracks dedicated to Blade Systems, Unix/Linux, and Best Practices and Emerging Technologies.

HP's 3000 business manager Jennie Hou has checked in with us and says HP will be at the event as well, briefing customers on the platform updates. You can never be sure what will change in HP's policies or forecasts. We know, for example, that another PowerPatch is being released this year, a collection of the patches for MPE/iX 7.5. There may be other news, too. A vendor exhibit area at the meeting will let you make face to face contacts with other community suppliers and partners, too.

We believe this is an important meeting, one that you should make a strong effort to attend. Since the resources and strategies of the 3000 community are changing, with third parties playing a larger role than ever, it’s a smart choice to get updated at the GHRUG event. The user group has even added a feature new to conference registration: you can pay the $175 fee online at the event Web site with your credit card or PayPal.

HP 3000 conferences have always played a strong role in keeping the community working together. That kind of work is an HP 3000 tradition.

This meeting provides good 3000 training from some of the most seasoned experts, other technologies which complement your HP 3000’s mission-critical role, as well as a chance to network with IT professionals. The cost is nominal, while the benefits are easy to count upon. Training. Strategy. Networking. News.

We urge you to attend this conference and connect with your community, especially in a time of change for the 3000 manager. Please visit the GHRUG conference Web site at www.ghrug.org/ghrug.htm to register and reserve a hotel room (at discounted rates). Alfredo Rego will be the conference’s keynote speaker, and we hope to see you in Houston next month.

Quiz gives no more answers for some

3000 community members reported in November, December and January that their Quiz 5.01 report writer, a mainstay on thousands of HP 3000s at one time, warned them it would expire on Feb. 1. True to its warnings, the software for some customers has quit running, as well as QTP and Quick

Tom Combs of Telalert alerted the community on February 4 about his Quick and Quiz applications

On January 1 2008 they started issuing warnings that they were about to expire; on February 1, they did expire.  These were supposed to be perpetual licenses.

Cognos product manager Bob Deskin, who shepherds the PowerHouse line of products, confirmed that these 3000 customers are coming to the end of a 20-year license. Their option is to call a Cognos sales representative — which may lead to some fee to pay to the company which IBM announced in November that it would purchase.

"PowerHouse 5.01 (QUICK/QUIZ/QTP) on MPE was licensed for 20 years," Deskin said, "as was clearly stated in the terms and conditions of the sales contracts. We did not start perpetual licenses until later releases. Anyone still using PowerHouse 5.01 should contact their Application Development Tools (ADT) Sales Representative."

John Pickering, a PowerHouse consultant to the 3000 and DEC communities, characterized the license as " a 20 year 'test drive' without paying any license fees!" Deskin said these 5.01 versions will be expiring as of this month. Many operate in 3000 shops with little remaining HP 3000 budget.

Customers who are still paying support to Cognos might have options within their service contracts to get Quiz running once more. The software became omnipresent in the 3000 community as MANMAN rose in popularity, since Quiz was bundled with earlier copies of the MRP package.

Deskin said, "Contacting the ADT sales rep is our best advice for customers so they can clarify their support coverage or determine what next steps if any need to be taken. Versions 5.01 and prior were sold with a 20-year license and subsequent versions were sold with perpetual licenses."

For the record, Cognos and IBM closed their $5 billion deal to make Cognos part of Big Blue one day before these licenses expired. The official release about closing the deal made no mention of the ADT group:

IBM acquired  Cognos to accelerate its Information  on Demand strategy, a  cross-company initiative that combines IBM's strength in information integration, content and data management

Through this acquisition, IBM and Cognos will  become the leading provider of technology and services for business intelligence and performance management, delivering the industry’s most complete, open standards-based platform with the broadest range of expertise to help companies expand the value of their information, optimize their business processes and maximize performance across their enterprises.

While the acquisition releases touted partner acceptance of business intelligence products from Cognos, at least joining the IBM fold has uncovered a more direct link to the PowerHouse products Web page. What used to be available only by going to powerhouse.cognos.com is now on the main Cognos products Web page, albeit in a drop-down menu.

Holding the line for & against RTUs

It's nearing springtime once more, and once again the HP 3000 community is exploring ways to flesh out new options for the systems HP builds no longer. Yesterday we reported here that Advant and Immediate Recovery Systems (IRS) have now partnered to give third party support companies the means to use HP's stable storage utility, ss_update.

The software lies behind an HP lockword, one which Advant, using the IRS software, will decode into a password for any support company (or any other self-supporting customer, we assume) for a fee. HP does not approve of this; the vendor has always insisted that 3000 stable storage is a system configuration which only HP can alter. HP believes that stable storage methods are a part of its intellectual property.

Last time around, HP created the first HP 3000 product in three years, an MPE/iX Right To Use (RTU) license, whose purpose was to clarify what could be changed on PA-RISC systems and still remain inside HP's license. This year, HP seems to be working on a reply to the Advant/IRS development. The only reply which HP could give us, when we sent the story into print within a whisker of our February deadline, was "HP continues to be concerned with protecting its intellectual property," from business manager Jennie Hou. That's the kind of placeholder statement Hewlett-Packard uses while it prepares something more formal and complete.

Which leads us to the latest option in the license arena. Orbit Software has offered VM+/iX since last year, its solution to increase horsepower and make PA-RISC server ownership more flexible. How this flexibility becomes a 3000 owner's option, considering HP's licensing intentions, has been discussed already, although VM/iX hasn't been mentioned by HP.

Let me take a moment to explain. Orbit describes VM+/iX as a server, according to the copy from the company's Web site. Orbit personnel install this server at a customer site, and in addition to your 3000 backups they need print-outs from SYSGEN and NMMGR off a customer's current HP 3000, along with a DSTAT ALL and DISCFREE C listing.

Orbit's Keith Wadsworth weighed in today with a statement about the current HP RTUs. "Our goal with VM+/iX is to offer MPE users adequate hardware performance and support options so they can continue to run their IT operations economically for the present and foreseeable future, while they plan and execute their migration plans."

More to the point regarding the HP concerns, Wadsworth stated, "We believe that original MPE software licenses do not prohibit using MPE on any computer hardware configuration that it will run on."

The balance of the Orbit statement included a reminder that HP told its customers about a five-year plan for 3000 development — which Wadsworth remembers HP stated less than a year before Hewlett-Packard started its public pullout from the 3000 community. He said,

However, recently questions have arisen regarding HP’s newer RTU “policy” scheme. It is our belief that the RTU policy and any possible future restrictions are an attempt by HP to retroactively redefine the MPE software license. However it is generally believed that the RTU policy is not applicable if users do not sign them.

Many will remember a flyer in May of 2001 in which Ann Livermore of HP stated, “So, are we committed to the HP e3000 platform? The answer is absolutely, yes! And how do we demonstrate this commitment? By having a 5-year roadmap for new product development. By bringing many of the latest Internet technologies to the platform. And by gaining new customers through vertical applications running on the HP e3000.”

We all know the platform was killed six months later and therefore users and third party application providers began developing new business strategies and plans for the remaining life of MPE.

Yet today many of us find ourselves very puzzled. On one hand HP keeps insisting (for over six years now) that the MPE platform is being made obsolete. On the other hand HP seems to be handling MPE as on ongoing business offering with a future by again extending product support and the RTU policy scheme.

So we now have more questions and fewer answers. Questions like: How do the remaining e3000 users plan? How do third party vendors plan? What will HP do next? And what do these RTUs mean to OpenMPE’s plans and other third party vendors plans and hopes for such things as binary patches and emulators?

The last sentence in Wadsworth's statement draws extra interest from me, since he is running this month for a board of directors seat with OpenMPE. Since the Orbit VM+/iX option is meant to improve performance and make support more flexible, this solution might be used at a customer site without migration plans firmed up. Yes, that's you, homesteaders.

We expect more on this story, perhaps from community members and partners as well as HP, soon enough.

Program opens access to HP tools for third party support

In a story which we squeezed in just hours before our February print deadline, Steve Pirie of 3000 hardware support provider Advant reported that the company’s software partner Immediate Recovery Solutions (IRS), has developed a program to transform HP 3000 lockwords to passwords — the character strings needed to operate HP’s ss_update configuration program.

The new SSPWD takes an HP lockword — designed to limit use of ss_update to HP’s support personnel — and delivers the corresponding password to let a support provider start and use ss_update.

HP developed ss_update as a follow-on tool to reset 3000 system board information after its SS_CONFIG software had its passwords removed. Pirie said the ss_update software, which Advant will unlock at the request of third party support companies for a fee, doesn’t start with any warning that HP restricts ss_update use to HP employees. (See the printout at left for a sample of what ss_update can modify on a PA-RISC server, be it an L-Class HP-UX system or a K- or N-Class HP 3000. Click it to enlarge)

“We’ve seen copies of SS_CONFIG which had a disclaimer, but it just so happens [ss_update] doesn’t, or HP didn’t really care,” Pirie said. The ss_update program can be a key service tool for a support company which needs to configure spare HP 3000 SPU boards. This kind of configuration is only available through HP’s support group today, he added.

The ss_update software resides on every HP 3000, he added, a theory which might prevent HP from generating another follow-on program for 3000 diagnostics, as it did when an unlocked SS_CONFIG was used by some resellers during 1990s. HP sued and filed criminal complaints against Abtech, Hardware House and others in 1999, claiming that SS_CONFIG was used illegally to switch the personalities of HP RISC hardware, from HP-UX booting to MPE/iX booting systems. HP prevailed in those suits and had California officials plea bargain with resellers in some criminal cases.

HP's ss_update program contains commands to do this kind of switching, but Pirie said it’s not the intention of Advant or IRS to enable this. SSPWD is an MPE/iX program. “It seems to be fair game for anyone to use ss_update,” he said, “since HP decided they didn’t need any disclaimers. HP’s always been particular about this.”

Pirie confirmed that neither Advant or IRS has discussed SSPWD with HP. The vendor’s exit plans prompted the creation of the IRS program.

“HP announced in 2001 that they’re out of the [3000] marketplace,” he said. “We’re developing tools that we need. Once you announce you’re leaving the marketplace, HP should be careful. What happens if HP is in there trying to manipulate their options, and they didn’t leave the marketplace? Then they could be liable for a lot of damages. It might be better if HP just left the market.”

An example of the jobstream from a SSPWD unlock, then subsequent ss_update operation, is available at the IRS Web page www.irs4hp.com/sspwd.html.

Seven vie for six OpenMPE posts

Today voting began for the 2008 OpenMPE board election. At press time we received the full list of nominees for posts on this year’s directors. As in the past several years, the number of nominees exceed the number of seats up for election by exactly one.

    Nominees new to this year’s election are Keith Wadsworth of Orbit Software (top left), Alan Tibbets of Strobe Data and Walter Murray of California's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (below). Tibbets, Murray and Wadsworth are among the seven candidates competing in an election which runs through 5 PM Pacific on Feb. 29. Voting is held through the OpenMPE Web site; a current membership ID number is required — but being an OpenMPE member is free, and the group will accept memberships during the election period.

Paul Edwards has retired from the OpenMPE board in mid-term, and Speedware’s Jennifer Fisher declined to run for another term on the volunteer advocacy board. Incumbent members Donna Garverick, Tracy Johnson, John Wolff and Matt Perdue are running for re-election. That makes six seats up for grabs among even candidates, with all voting to be done only by OpenMPE members.

Membership is free and available at openmpe.org/Membership.htm, and biographies of the candidates are at www.openmpe.org/OpenMPEBoardCandidates.htm.

New Endeavor hopes to create community

In our podcast (5 minutes, 5 MB) for a February weekend, we look at election season and the alliance of three HP user groups. There's good reason to join forces in 2008, but the benefits might extend to more than just a louder, more representative voice to Hewlett-Packard. Take five minutes to listen to our podcast and hear what the alliance wants to do — maybe for you.

HP always wanted a single group to talk with and listen to, and the new alliance — which might be called Endeavor — wants to leave nobody out of the bigger picture. Encompass president Nina Buik even said the new group could advocate for the 3000 homesteader. There's interim homesteaders, like the customers who won't migrate until 2013, and the permanent ones. Endeavor wants to help both. It's a good reason to join this now-free group, even if you're part of the 3000 community whose voice is fading in HP's ears.

On Monday we'll survey the field for another election, the OpenMPE board of directors. That group of volunteers has survived six years on virtually no budget and plenty of roadkill. A larger user group needs to encompass, as it were, what OpenMPE has been seeking for some time. Licensing HP's source code, or just being able to patch it, is a good mission for the new Endeavor.

One user group ring bands them all

HP user group Encompass took a big step toward the ultimate alliance of HP enterprise computer customers this week, when the largest North American HP user group announced it will unite with two of the others. Now Encompass, the Tandem group ITUG, and HP-Interex Europe/Middle East/Africa will all work together, bound under a single group which will have a new name announced sometime this year. HP-Interex EMEA was allied with the now-defunct HP user group Interex, but Interex EMEA survived Interex North America's 2005 bankruptcy.

This week's move nearly completes a consolidation of at least six user groups which existed in 2005. Encompass and Interex North America had worked on a few annual HP World user meetings together prior to that date, but when Interex shut its doors suddenly, Encompass took on some Interex members. Still, groups from the NonStop/Tandem base, OpenView, overseas Interex groups and Asia/Pacific membership still remained as separate advocacy and information points. HP had to listen to all, but wished for one group to represent everybody.

Board director Chris Koppe, a former Interex North America director, alerted us of the new assembly, which now is only missing the OpenView users group Vivit to complete the group roster. Encompass brings 16,000 members, ITUG 2,500 and Interex EMEA 33,000 — but increasing the size of the group is not as important as the membership's scope. HP's liaison with customers will grow more focused in  a single, larger group.

"In the days when I was working at Interex, this was something was all wished would happen, that the user groups would follow HP's path," Koppe said of the merger. "Corporate mergers are one of those things where somebody decides to buy somebody else. User groups don't come together as quickly, but I think this is getting close to where we want to be. Individually it was very hard to get HP's attention, and that model now changes going forward."

Users of all the groups, which include Encompass Asia/Pacific, will receive a free one year membership to the combined group.

Encompass spread the news through a press release on its Web site (PDF file), plus a blog entry from Encompass board president Nina Buik which defined the new association. Merger, she says, is not the right word to describe what's bringing together thousands of members.

Buik said in her entry from Tuesday,

The word merge implies that someone, or rather a group, is giving up something and that’s not the case here and couldn’t be further from the truth. We are uniting from positions of strength and equity bringing the best of our complementary skills together in the new organization.

She added that Encompass will be "putting this before the membership for a vote this spring." Koppe said Hewlett-Packard has been hopeful this kind of consolidation would happen among user organizations.

"Today, all of these organizations have a much higher level of sponsorship in HP than they had in the past," he said. "HP has been quite supportive of the idea of us doing this [unification]. They've taken and back seat in it and don't want to be pushing it, because it's not their organization."

Combining the groups into a single unit "has the ability to carry more weight within HP as an advocacy source," Koppe said. "If HP wants to know what their customers are saying, here's the largest group of their customers, and they're all highly organized. The ability to effect change on HP will be much bigger than it's been before."