Welcome to the new business year for HP 3000 owners, a time when things have changed for some 3000 sites, while for others they're pretty much the same.

Sites are still checking in with reports of 2011 support offers from Hewlett-Packard. At the University of Washington Medical Centers Pharmacy, the 3000s are under HP's care -- and the vendor wants it to stay that way, here in this year after the vendor's "end of life." Computer services coordinator Deane Bell reports.

I received a proposed contract in mid-December from HP to continue our HP3000/969 support post-2010. The proposal is for the same level of coverage (7x24x365 4-hour response).  It will now be two contracts (I had to specifically request the separate 'mature product support' contract). The standard contract covers LDEV1 and not much more. The 'mature product support' contract covers the rest of our equipment, except for the Jamaica disk drives (9GB and 18GB) which fell off support two years ago.

The combined cost of the two contracts is significantly more than last year (but less than two times last year's cost) Since we're hoping to be off the 3000 (sadly) by the third quarter of 2011, most likely we'll accept the HP contract proposals.

The University was courted by third party support firms about its system support, too.