Ongoing sales suggest panic has slowed
June 19, 2009
It's a dubious fact you'll hear among community members and partners: Practically just about everyone has migrated from the HP 3000. But 3000 resellers report that their continued sales suggest much less urgency to move this year than in 2005 or earlier.
"I sell 9X9s and e3000 N4000's every month," reports Bay Pointe Technology's Bob Sigworth. "The migration panic has slowed considerably. Are we selling to new MPE users? No. But there are many, I repeat many, large, companies that are adding to their infrastructure and have no plans to migrate. Why? MPE is solid as a rock and the third-party support people are better than ever."
The topic surfaced recently when options beyond the HP 3000 came up in the 3000 newsgroup. "What is OpenMPE fighting for?" said one community volunteer. "Some version of MPE that sits on a Windows or Linux box. What's the point of that?"
The point is the same as the data point of continued sales of 3000s and good third-party support suppliers. There's life beyond HP, and a life beyond the 3000. Companies make a case every day for both kinds of life. Nobody's in a panic by now, more than seven years after HP started its 3000 exit.
And if MPE can sit on a Linux box, that's important for hardware options far into the future. Hewlett-Packard's 3000 hardware, aging all the time, can be taken out of the homesteading formula sometime in the future, perhaps beyond 2012, when the existing hardware has run its course. (You can contact Strobe Data to see how this emulation works to replace hardware for the HP 1000, and Digital Vaxen -- and for whom.)
Many other things are needed to make MPE on Linux a success, like support, marketing, R&D -- the usual list of suspects to make any product succeed. Oh, modifiable source wouldn’t hurt, either. See that pipe to HP, above, to send your requests for real source.