IBM suggests other migration route
April 9, 2009
IBM has pulled away from its proposed purchase of Sun Microsystems, but Big Blue is always on the hunt for ways to swipe HP business. Buying Sun and its Solaris OS would have given IBM a way to put pressure on the survival of HP-UX, HP's recommended migration solution for complex HP 3000 installations. But even the network management nodes, often monitored by HP-UX servers, are targets for a migration.
IBM is now tracking customers who use OpenView, offering a 25 discount to get them to migrate to IBM Tivoli Netcool, the latest version and name of IBM's net management suite. Chris Bartram, who set up the NewsWire's first Web site and remains one of the best networking experts for HP 3000s, called our attention to the IBM promotion.
Five different kinds of "Who should migrate" HP customers are listed on IBM's Migrate from HP Web pages. We found this one most interesting:
HP hasn't officially abandoned MPE/iX — unless closing the software's lab counts, or setting an exit date for supporting the OS.
3000 customers with complex job management might remember the Tivoli name. That IBM division took over the Maestro MPE/iX products when it purchased them from Unison in the late 1990s, then sold them back to the 3000 marketplace. ROC Software took on the software, which it still sells and supports for the platform.
Tivoli waded into the HP Unix marketplace with Tivoli Workload Scheduler. Now the vendor will offer a cash discount to earn the business of HP customers who use HP-UX network management. IBM still likes to portray HP's Unix as a platform in migration mode. Actually, HP says this about its Unix customers, too. But Hewlett-Packard thinks of the migration as a PA-RISC-to -Itanium hardware swap, or a HP-UX 11v-whatever to 11v3 move.
IBM has its success stories to pump, of course, the reference accounts where the news is always good (and nobody knows what cost kickbacks the vendor exchanged for the testimonial). Big Blue calls them Case Studies. If you're headed for an IBM-centric migration target, reading a few of these might be worthwhile.