A few other HP notes of 3000 news
June 18, 2008
HP shared three other pieces of news in its Tuesday briefings at the HP Technology Forum. The set of slides presented by HP vCSY staffer Alvina Nishimoto showed no changes from the slides shown in May for HP EMEA partners and customers.
But in less than 10 minutes at nearly 6 PM Tuesday, HP's Jim Hawkins shared three bits of news from the HP division about the 3000.
1. Cost of the RTU licenses is coming down, expecially on the high end server Right to Use licenses. HP has been selling RTUs for the customer who is upgrading an HP 3000 — instead of migrating, or as an interim step toward moving off a 3000. How many RTUs HP's selling is not known, of course, but it appears that the RTU is generating more revenues than HP R&D Lab Manager Ross McDonald predicted last year at RTU introduction. HP is looking at 35 to 50 percent reductions in the RTU fees.
2, As mentioned yesterday, HP will be shipping out its PowerPatch 5 for MPE/iX in August. HP's support chief Bernard Determe — who was listed for the first time yesterday as a customer contact for the 3000 community — within the remains of the lab services available to HP's 3000 operations. The support chief said that the 3000 support arm "will be losing its lab" 27 weeks from now.
3. Maybe most important to the long-term use of the HP 3000, HP's problem resolution database will be available on HP servers after 2010, when HP plans to exit the 3000 community.
Hawkins said that HP's servers will continue to host the information on solutions to HP 3000 problems — usually references to HP MPE/iX patches — until at least 2015.
"We won't be wiping off those disks just because they have MPE information on them," Hawkins said.
Since HP won't be selling support in 2011, it's possible those knowledge base reports — called Service Requests (SRs), among other names inside HP — will be available to the HP 3000 community in total, not just HP support customers. After all, in January of 2011, HP won't have anything to sell a 3000 site other than upgrade licenses, license transfers at $400 each, and whatever under-wraps support the vendor might sell.