As our At-Large columnist Birket Foster wrote in February, application vendors get acquired and trigger changes. Even vendors who've already moved many customers off of the HP 3000. Some portion of the migrated Ecometry community, as well as those still running the MPE version of the ecommerce software, are weighing their timelines for migration and changes.

The company pulling that trigger is JDA, which merged with the current Ecometry owner RedPrairie early this year. The result has been a stable of 133 software products, between the two vendors' lineups. Every one of them has a story for the customer, a report still in the making for many products. JDA recently said that nothing will be discontinued for five years. That makes 2018 something of a execution deadline for retailers using Ecometry, which is being called Escalate Retail.

"This was a merger of equals," Foster told us last week, right after the company educated some managers on data migration practices. Neither of these entities want to obsolete a product, because that would be a big loss of revenue. If nothing else, the current customers pay support fees. If there's versions to upgrade towards, there might be upgrade license fees to pay.

The greater ricochet from the trigger-pull is mapping out and planning for the use of the surround code that supports Escalate Retail, as well as the MPE-based Ecometry. More companies than we'd think have a loose track on workflows that require surround tools, such as Suprtool -- which is pretty much essential to reporting and extracting data out of their applications.

The changes in the environment of ecommerce users became evident at the JDA conference this spring. About 100 people in the Ecometry community were on hand, by Foster's estimate. When the shows were Ecometry-only -- a long while back -- more than 500 attendees was common. There were fewer sessions offered for Ecometry customers who are now looking at if, and when, they'll need to make a migration away from their bedrock application.