Yesterday we looked at the advantages of being big: When a 3000 user gets more from a company which sprawls with super size, in sales and scope of solutions. You get predictability, alliances and headroom from companies like HP (Number 1 in server revenues and units shipped in the most recent quarter.)

But the 3000 community member needs to understand that smaller is better -- not bigger -- when they need what the independent vendor lives upon. Small companies respond faster, polish relationships, and commit for life. Let's look at how a smaller partner delivers larger value. It's important to the 3000 user who's seeking new vendors to replace big ones who are leaving.

Faster response can mean software that is enhanced sooner, or answers that resolve problems more quickly -- because a smaller company has fewer layers for a customer to dive through. Relationship polishing is the personal attention to a company of any size: the kind of experience that HP 3000 managers, who may now be CIOs and CTOs, recall getting from a smaller HP.

Yesterday the business press reported that Apple has now passed Microsoft in tech company market cap size. In plainer terms, Apple is the biggest technology company in the world's stock markets. Yes, even larger than HP's share price times its outstanding shares. Analysts and editors called this a milestone for Apple. But being biggest of all -- when does it matter to the customers, and not just us observers?

This is a good question to consider in the 3000 community, because size is a changing aspect of your 2010. A very large company (HP) is leaving the 3000 market, at years' end, to much smaller independents. Meanwhile, other HP operations have retained 3000 customers' purchases, because the big company's tech portfolio is broader, with more IT facets to offer.

When does size matter to a tech customer? When they want predictability, alliances and headroom. Gartner reported estimates of HP numbers in server market share this week. During the most recent quarter, Gartner said HP was No. 1, passing IBM in system revenue for the first time since 2008. Choosing the solutions of a leader evokes comfort from some companies. That kind of customer is large, and large companies never comprised a serious share of the number of 3000 customers. So does size matter to the 3000 market -- and how much?

Well before the rest of the 3000 community discovered it, Robelle used the Web. Former president David Greer told us in an interview in 1999 the company posted its first Web pages in 1994. By the time the 3000 NewsWire mounted its first Web pages early in 1996, Robelle was already showing off its expertise delivering information on the Web. Much of the wisdom's presentation follows the Keep It Simple, Stupid mantra.

Robelle's site brims with 3000 help but never tempts you to watch movies, paw through a Flash presentation or prowl into a company photo album. Instead, the supplier of database language tools dishes out 3000 knowledge with the most straightforward of interfaces. Robelle taught us to keep our own Web designs simple enough that anyone would be able to access the knowledge. Robelle's been building these resources for 30 years by now.

One unique resource on the Robelle Website is its collection of consultants. The company has selected and screened these consultants for experience in Qedit, Suprtool and Suprtool-based applications. The providers Robelle has cataloged know the HP 3000 at an advanced level; Suprtool and Qedit were born and grew up on the 3000.

There's a modest list of 3000 consultants at the OpenMPE site, one that hasn't been updated in almost five years. But professional companies are providing 3000 knowledge resources which are more current. On the other hand, there's timeless 3000 information at robelle.com.

Several HP 3000 development jobs have surfaced in Chennai, TN. But before you get your resume ready to send to Tennessee, or consider a contract for Chennai, take a moment to Google the city. It's in the Tamil Nadu state of India. There's a growing stream of HP 3000 jobs well offshore of North America. India is 11 time zones away from corporations on the US West coast. But the industrious Indians have been working to take on HP 3000 application maintenance for companies who have lost their 3000 developer.

Just look at the skill set requested by CMMi. It reads like a inventory of popular 3000 tools and environments. (We think that "VSAM" is really KSAM.)

Experience in design and development of HP3000 based applications. Experience in COBOL and VSAM. Good knowledge in various tools like SUPRTOOL, HPEDIT, QEDIT, HP Browse, Hpsearch, HP Link Editor, Query, FCOPY, Conman, Arranger and Maestro used in HP 3000 system.

Of course, a development company that is struggling to get the name of KSAM correct would be just learning the environment. Which could encourage a 3000 customer to look closer to North America at one of the many providers of application support for MPE/iX apps.

David Greer is charting a fresh course in familiar waters. The Robelle president took a break from the industry in 2001, leaving Robelle after more than 20 years. At age 43 Greer recognized that “My wife Karalee and I had an opportunity of a lifetime. Rather than plunge back into work we decided to do something completely different.” He let the lift of his flexibility propel him onto a two-year cruise in the Mediterranean on his sailboat with his wife and three children, a trip he blogged extensively and looked to be the envy of many an overworked IT pro. Greer separated from the 3000 community less than a year before HP announced its exit plans, but he says he has never drifted far from his contacts and friends in spirit. Several times we talked about ventures in growing companies as well as life practices. Now he's returned to the market as MB Foster's Director of Marketing and Sales, extending a longtime relationship with that firm's founder Birket Foster.

In the eight years he was away Greer explored other ports of call in the industry. Once he got his land legs again, he returned to work as a director on boards of small start-ups, gathering experience that's not easily found in the world of the 3000. He worked as VP of Sales and Marketing at eOptimize, an enterprise resource scheduling vendor whose Microsoft Exchange products were installed at very large financial services companies. He helped start up MailChannels, an anti-spam company and Backbone Systems, a Software as a Service company.

The work took him into boardrooms for investment and promotion while the strategic efforts led to study of cutting-edge IT issues. We wanted to hear what experiences from his time abroad had taught him about the challenges and opportunities of the 3000 market. We spoke in early April just after Apple's first iPad shipments, at a time when Greer had worked at his new post for about two months.

What made you decide to re-enter the HP 3000 market?

Principally, my relationship with Birket Foster. It all comes full circle. Birket and I have known each other since we met at a conference in 1981. We've stayed in touch on a personal level: We met in London at the start of my Mediterranean trip, we've skied together, been in each other's homes. Then there were some things he wanted help with, so I did some projects for him over the past year. As we developed the relationship it seemed to make sense to take it to the next level.
    I'm back after a significant absence, but I still recognize the 3000 market. I even recognize many of the company names I'm calling.

If the keynote speaker events haven't changed much since the HP Technology Forum started, the June conference is adding a new connection to Hewlett-Packard. The meeting is now letting attendees schedule one-to-one time with HP experts.

Once you register for the show, you're able to request a meeting time with an HP "subject expert."

Discuss your unique IT environment and objectives with HP developers, engineers, product managers, and strategists during one-to-one meetings that you may schedule in advance. Schedule early to reserve time with specialists in your areas of interest. Once registered, you can access the list of HP participants and immediately request a one-to-one meeting.

The Forum has not expanded much on the concept of an HP executive giving a rally speech in a big tent event. But giving its customers a way to access conference-grade expertise is a significant lift. The conference organizers are showing off a big list of prospective expertise, although what's on tap remains to be seen. Registrants are the only ones allowed to look over the list for 2010.

HP and the Connect user group are pushing for registrations at the HP Technology Forum & Expo, which starts June 21 in Las Vegas. The meeting's keynote schedules surfaced yesterday, a lineup that includes the new leader of HP's enterprise server business Dave Donatelli.

Recently arrived from HP storage rival EMC, Donatelli now leads the HP Enterprise Servers and Networking unit at Hewlett-Packard. This group includes the HP 3000 replacements suggested by HP, the Integrity and ProLiant models that host Unix and Windows, respectively. Donatelli is a computer industry exec with more than a quarter-century of experience with enterprise vendors.

The Tech Forum organizers have put his speech up for the first keynote of the conference's full day. If an HP executive's keynote speech is a motivator to spark your registration, you can look at a certain preview at HP's video Website. Two HP staffers, Louis Gombos and Becca Taylor, have been posting Twitter messages that outline the Top 10 Reasons to Attend the Tech Forum.

When the HP 3000 was in its market heyday (circa mid-'80s), a phrase rose up that's been plastered up worldwide while being misquoted. "Information wants to be free," ran part of a speech by Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand. What Brand was really saying addressed the cost of gathering information. From an article in the Guardian newspaper, Cory Doctorow explains, a note that also tags the true value of 3000 shared information.

"Information wants to be free" is half of Stewart Brand's famous aphorism, first uttered at the Hackers Conference in Marin County, California (where else?), in 1984: "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

The cost of getting out HP 3000 information has remained low because of community resources. Last week we noted the technical expertise on the Allegro Consultants Web site. Another sponsor of that cost is Adager. These creators of IMAGE tools were among the very first to make technical papers available to the community online. (Before that, during the above-mentioned heyday, they printed and mailed tech papers to everyone who requested the information.)

The cost of dispersing the information is one aspect of the 3000 community's resource. But the other element is the knowledge itself. There are papers online at the Adager site, such as IMAGE/SQL Database Foundations, that teach fundamentals about the 3000's database you simply cannot access anywhere else today. Certainly not with the ease of a click on one of Adager's links. This knowledge isn't arcane, either -- especially if you need to teach an IT architect the nature of IMAGE/SQL with that paper, and so distinguish it from a relational database. Adager is the keeper of the IMAGE treasure. By extension, that's the heart of the 3000's riches.

HP has reported its second-highest quarter of profits over the last two years, led by second-quarter 2010 increases in Windows servers, PCs and storage sales. CEO Mark Hurd led off his remarks to analysts by pointing to sales of the Industry Standard Servers, a product that enjoyed a rebound as recession belts loosened.

"After many customers diverted purchases in 2009, we are seeing strong growth in a number of our businesses," he said.

But the path to growth remains blocked for the Business Critical Servers group of HP, the unit that houses the R&D and planning for HP's Integrity servers. HP's suggested 3000 replacements saw their unit's revenues drop 17 percent from 2009's Q2. The BCS operates inside HP's Enterprise Storage and Servers (ESS) unit.

A brighter outlook came from the ESS's Industry Standard Servers unit, where the ProLiant and Windows solutions have been thriving. HP reported a 54 percent increase in ISS revenues. Storage solutions, and blade server revenues overall for ESS including the Windows solutions, rose to push the unit's total profit to $571 million on $4.5 billion in revenue.

HP added $3.5 billion in overall sales during the quarter ended April 30. Its profits also rose by 25 percent, to $2.9 billion for Q2. HP's Personal Systems Group, where the new acquisition of the Palm WebOS will be deployed, increased revenues by 21 percent. HP started to report "commercial client revenue" for the first time out of PCs, noting a 19 percent increase in purchases of HP's desktop and notebook systems by business.

When the wholly owned subsidiary True Value Canada made its migration away from in-house HP 3000 ERP, HP lost a customer to the world of Windows and Intel systems. IT manager Tim Boychuk said choosing Windows over HP-UX, or anyone else's Unix, was not difficult.

"We weren't very much of a Unix shop prior to our transition," Boychuk said. "There wasn't anything here that was was Unix-based, or even Linux-based. All of our file systems and print servers were Windows-based before we migrated. The only thing that wasn't Windows-based was the HP 3000."

True Value's story is typical of the 3000 migrator. HP announces its end of 3000 support and development, so there's a vision of no more life for the MPE/iX systems. The announcement triggers a plan to renovate the IT services in the company, fueled by more thorough use of the data. It all starts, of course, with the HP news of 2001, telling customers there was no more future in the 3000. As it turned out, this was the end of HP's future at True Value.

"There was an end-of-life cycle for MPE," Boychuk said. "We also wanted to improve our data access by going to a new ERP system, and that was one of the things that was most attractive. To this day I think that was a good move, because of data access down at the desktop. It's now very easy to do a lookup or a quick report on the data, because it's all integrated on one database." That's a Microsoft SQL Server database today, more than two years after the company completed its move away from both the 3000 and HP.

Hillary Software's byRequest has been one of the few constants in the IT architecture, however. The software that uses email to move reports around an organization, as well as distribute them over the Web, remains essential for communicating with more than 700 dealers across Canada. byRequest began its True Value service talking with the HP 3000.

This week I wrote an article that counted the number of resources the 3000 community calls upon. But there's another aspect to the richness of help in this 35-year-old community. A handful of its most senior partners have shared their knowledge for decades. This series will take a look at the wealth that comes from using a mature computer.

Our first stop might as well be Allegro Consultants. When we say call upon in this overview, we mean it literally. All of these companies operate telephone help desks for customers. And they all host Web sites stocked with rich layers of instruction, tools, techniques and even some legend. Allegro's 26 years in the community has generated many white papers and free software.

Allegro shares more than the technical lessons relevant to the 3000. President Steve Cooper and his partners believe in sharing information, as do the other companies on this roundup. The concept was once dubbed "information just wants to be free." Like anyone who donates, he's found that the practice delivers rich returns, based on the deep relationships a service company can spark by giving useful things away.

"We've got customers who have been with us for 20-plus years," Cooper said. "We've been good community members with a wall full of plaques -- I'm proud of that -- and it's paid off in spades. Because we're still here."

Although the recently-announced SuprtoolSQL does offer Windows users a Suprtool replacement, at the moment the product is only engineered to work with the Oracle database on Windows servers.

"SuprtoolSQL works with Oracle currently," said Robelle's developer Neil Armstrong. But he adds that Oracle isn't the only database the product is capable of supporting. "A good reason not to specify that you must have Oracle is that we still want to talk to customers and learn about their issues. Other SQL databases are possible. I don't think we know what the market will come up with in terms of who's left, but we want to keep the dialogue going."

Charles Finley of Transformix, whose engineering team developed the Oracle-based solution, says the most popular Windows database is just a matter of a few weeks' development away.

"We started working on the SQL Server version because we’ve had several people asking for it," Finley said. "Still, it’s a low priority until we get a customer to test it. We are estimating that it will only take us about two weeks of effort." Until the rollout of SuprtoolSQL, 3000 sites who migrate to Windows had to part ways with Suprtool, which often surrounds 3000 application code. The new solution requires a services engagement with Transformix.

Homesteading sites in the 3000 community must consider resources when they plan a transition or a sustaining plan. The primary resource in deciding to homestead is knowledge and talent of 3000 IT pros. There's no clear way to measure the available brainpower in the community. Consultants come and go, but support companies come and tend to stay. Some migration-transition suppliers -- Speedware and MB Foster come to mind -- have experts on call to help homestead.

But you can count five kinds of software and documentation resources that can help a homesteader. HP's 3000 documentation is the easiest to count and has the widest reach. Speedware licensed that resource and can start to serve those docs and manuals next year. HP will also serve docs until 2015 on its current plan.

Second on the resource list are white papers and some programs from the Jazz server that HP closed in 2008. Jazz contents are hosted, and have been licensed, to Speedware as well as Client Systems. Only HP's white papers and its software are among the Jazz contents; independent developers' work isn't covered. In some cases, those open source programs have become unavailable, for the moment.

The third resource? That's the Invent3k public access development server. HP granted a license for Invent3k to OpenMPE. Speedware and Client Systems don't want to get into this resource, although you can make a  case for how they might manage it with competence. After all, both of these companies have put Jazz online within six months of HP shutting off that server.

When you get down to resources four and five, among these assets, you find the longest-buried and most restricted items. Buried are the Contributed Software Library programs. Restricted are the parts of MPE/iX source that HP licensed to eight entities. Numbers 4 and 5 are different -- nobody seems to be releasing the CSL, while seven support firms and software developers have paid for that source license.

The eighth licensee is OpenMPE. It's being challenged to open a portal to the CSL as well as develop a means to use MPE/iX source. Until this group shows off a business and operational plan for source, and publishes access to a CSL portal, invent3K is the only resource the group might offer you can't get elsewhere. Instead of five resources, you've got three: docs, Jazz and source. All come from genuine, estabished independent companies.

Microsoft is in the middle of a migration, too. The service and software providers who migrate 3000 sites -- or just support homesteaders with a lot of Windows -- can roll their eyes at all the changes. But the shift from XP to Windows 7 is much bigger a deal than everyday security patches and product updates. Right?

Well, not so much. Over and over we've found that the 3000 site which has embraced Windows as a replacement doesn't perceive XP as a lame duck. At True Value Hardware Canada, for example, IT Director Tim Boychuk said the Microsoft announcements of end of XP life haven't changed his strategy.

"The majority of our production systems are XP," he said. "We're in the prototype stages of testing Windows 7 with [installed ERP solution] Microsoft Dynamics. If [Microsoft] does an announcement of end of support, they have extended it." The latest extension was announced last August; XP now has a 2014 end date.

This is practical and cost-effective IT management, the execution of "not broke, don't change it" strategy. Microsoft's latest announcement puts the third extension onto ending the life of XP Service Pack 2, with a new date of July 13. Online support is available after that, but extended support via Microsoft ends this summer. The simplest way to stick with Microsoft support is to upgrade clients to SP3.

Is it go-time for OpenMPE? That go could mean time to get to the group's goals, or time to go into the community's shadows. Late last week we saw a tea leaf to read about the taciturn group.

The 3000 NewsWire contributed $500 toward the OpenMPE source code license, and our check was cashed last week. It has been in OpenMPE treasurer Matt Perdue's office since mid-March. We don't need any formal receipt for contributing, in contrast to what you may read in the group's March minutes. Despite the fact that several of our sponsor partners have paid for licenses on their own, it just looked like OpenMPE needed the help. Any receipt would be just another to-do item.

Based on our tea-leaf-read of Perdue's remarks in the Community Meet gathering last fall, the source code costs $10,000 or more. I've probably written three times that many words covering the group's meetings, desires and dreams, drives for membership and annual elections, since 2002. Enough writing that one board member figured I'd been a director already. Not the best place for this editor to sit, frankly. I want to report to help the community decide.

That OpenMPE copy of the source code for MPE/iX is unimportant to the many 3000 sites who rely on one of the seven other licensees who hold it. OpenMPE holds a more unique resource, more ready to share but still offline. No, I'm not talking about Invent3k, the public access development server and programs. Another contribution is in the wings, and it isn't offered by another entity or penned up by a secret license.

The 3000 NewsWire seemed possible to me in the middle 1990s once I read the 3000-L listserv mailing list. During that decade the list's traffic would swell with every passing quarter, passing more than 2,000 messages a month that traded technique, examined IT and vendor strategy, and yes, observed current events and a steady stream of Friday Humor.

What followed, over the back half of the decade just past, was far from funny. Off Topic posts overran the traffic in the years leading up to and just beyond our last Presidential race. "The L," as the community members called it, became a shouting chamber dotted with few 3000 reports. That's all changed now, thank goodness. It's become safe to use this resource for 3000 savvy.

We're not sure why. The mailing list membership is counted -- that is, those who receive the advice via e-mails, classic computer style. Where it was once more than 1,500 readers by mail, it's now less than 500. More IT pros than the 500 peruse what's up there, however, because the listserv's contents are echoed to the newsgroup comp.sys.hp.mpe. (Remember newsgroups? Well, Google tracks them these days.)

You can read the revived L of today without feeling like you need to shower off spittle from frothing politicos. In the last few weeks the list offered advice about how to create and expand tar and zip files; how to know if you're running in batch; managing the AutoRAID 12H arrays for 3000s; even the going rate for consultants. The L operates as a kind of open forum for consulting on tactical 3000 issues.

HP has started to make a case for the fifth generation of LTO, or Linear Tape Open devices. LTO-5 products from the HP StorageWorks line are emerging, like the Ultrium 3000 tape drive. HP is now saying that LTO-5 storage can help IT departments stretch budget dollars, because the tape can take the place of disk storage that is more costly to buy and maintain.

It does not make sense to spend on expensive disks to quickly get to data you are unlikely to ever access. When times get tough, many feel as though there’s nowhere left to make improvements. The latest generation of LTO tape drives, tape media and automated tape libraries illustrates how technology can fill the void. With proactive management, lower cost per gigabyte, faster performance and data encryption, HP LTO-5 solutions can help companies do more with less.

When it comes to storage strategies and IO connections, HP's 3000 alternatives make a significant argument for a migration. HP ensured there would be a wide gap in functionality once it stopped developing IO and tape technology for the 3000 around 2005. As for Ultrium support, the 3000 never had parity with its Unix and Windows counterparts in the HP labs, not even in the beginning.

Jim Hawkins, formerly of the HP 3000 lab and still working at HP, pointed us at an HP Communicator article he wrote which sums up the last generation of LTO support for the 3000. The server can work with LTO-1 devices, at least under HP's official support guidelines. "LTO via LVD-SCSI would be about as far as I would go," he said today. "FiberChannel connections were not even attempted in the lab." Not even HP's own TurboStore backup app will support LTO, however. Orbit's Backup+ gets the job done, according to the Communicator report.

As you might guess, LTO-5 is a lot more advanced than the first-generation of linear tape. HP's latest charts don't even bother to compare the two; the comparison is between LTO-3 and LTO-5. Latest-generation storage is one thing that a homesteading 3000 site must leave behind, or attach to other HP systems that are networked to the 3000.

Last week we posted an article that proposed managers could touch 3000 administration far away from their console keyboards. Even though the system has had remote console capability for many years (the Web Console feature), touching a keyboard was a must.

Now some users want to know how they can dispense with their keys, using Apple's iPod Touch or even the nascent iPads. The marriage of 20th Century tech to last month's breakthough tablet is possible, but not well documented yet. Bob Schnelle of United McGill Corporation wants to know more. He owns a Touch and wants to reach his 3000s for remote management.

I received the latest 3000 NewsWire email and the article An iPad as a 3000 remote terminal? caught my eye.  After reading the article, it was never clear on whether or not this can be done. If it can be done, is there someplace that details the steps necessary to accomplish this?

It's possible and has been done, but the details are as nascent as the iPad. We'll take a moment to plug that email that summarizes our stories; about once a week or so it does this. Send your email address to me to give it a try, with easy, automatic opt-outs via Constant Contact.

Apple's success at placing the Touch and iPad (35 million of the former sold, and a million of the latter after just 30 days) may be a spark for more detail on how this Touching has been done. A few 3000 experts are already helping to fill in the gaps.

Last week we spotted an HP 3000 N-Class -- latest in the server's line -- selling for less than $3,000. Zounds! The 3000 Discount Era has started at last, we figured.

Not so fast. Before you start your mind racing to calculate how many 3000s you might be able to upgrade at that price, be aware of what's being offered. Bob Sigworth of Bay Pointe Technology, which posts available system offers on the 3000 newsgroup, said the license status of a system can reduce the price.

Sigworth didn't want to toss rocks at another seller's offer. After all, these companies buy and sell from one another. The way that deal often works is a 3000 user approaches their favorite reseller, seeking a particular system. If the reseller doesn't have one in inventory, they attempt to procure it to complete the sale. Offering "an MPE license" makes him ponder, however.

"When I hear the terminology MPE license, it typically means that you have the HP paperwork," he said, "so that you can legally transfer an MPE license through HP's Software License Transfer to an end user or new buyer. All 3000s came with a MPE pre-loaded, so my guess is that for a low price, a system probably has MPE 7.5 pre-loaded and is a working machine."

He adds that the N-Class 220s and 330s (the numbers refer to processor speed) are coming down in price. But does "working machine" mean it has a valid MPE license? Perhaps not.

In what might be a first for the 3000 community, a new tool has been announced first on Twitter and Linked In. MB Foster is rolling out MBF Scheduler this month, software designed to replicate the advanced streaming and scheduling features which 3000 customers have long deployed.

David Greer, the new director of Marketing and Sales at MB Foster and a 3000 developer since the 1970s, tweeted the notice of the new product over the weekend and a link to a new Web page at the MBFA site. We're working on gathering some specific details about the software's pedigree, but for now we can relay that the product proposes to "deliver the robust job scheduling features of the HP 3000 MPE operating system for the Microsoft Windows Server platform without the need of a separate Unix or Linux server."

We have heard from plenty of migrating sites that miss the built-in scheduling prowess of MPE/iX. Designed in the '70s as well, the 3000's OS always had scheduling as a high priority (pun intended) because the computer was launched to carve out business from the batch-rooted IBM customer base. Seems scheduling has become even more valuable in a world that wants to avoid deploying Unix or Linux.