Rising economic sectors offer 3000 growth foothold

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Rising economic sectors offer 3000 growth foothold

Expansion in transportation, health and distribution segments use transaction-heavy applications to establish MPE/iX beachheads

In some managers’ eyes an HP 3000 is viewed as a legacy computer system, old news hanging on after a quarter-century of service. But companies in growing economic segments are seeing the 3000 as new, reaching for the computer’s solutions to solve the problem of how to handle new business. Capable applications are driving new HP 3000 installations, as companies look at platforms only as a way to get business problems solved that involve massive transaction rates.

In business sectors as broad as airlines, healthcare, arts organizations, and distribution, HP 3000s are helping companies handle the growth that arrives in the style of the ‘90s: through acquisitions and IPOs. In most cases the expansion of the HP 3000 is bolstered by one key application available for that business sector. It’s software flexible enough to support existing computer resources while built on the bedrock of IMAGE databases and MPE simplicity of administration.

Opportunities for HP 3000s to assume computer duties from other platforms or to break new ground are being studied in the coming year by the HP 3000 division and its partners. If the past year saw customer erosion essentially halt for the 3000, now resellers, solution suppliers and customers report genuine prospects for growth of the installed base in the year to come.

Evidence overhead

Dave Evans has put new HP 3000s on the taxiway for takeoff. The founder of Open Skies, Inc., Evans’ MPE application efforts helped chart the flight path of one of the highest profile new customers running HP 3000s, Southwest Airlines. But while Evans’ ticketless reservation system has become important at Southwest, the system is ferrying information from other carriers by now. At the start of 1998, Open Skies’ HP 3000 solutions were running at 11 other airlines around the world, poised for several additional takeoffs.

The 3000’s gateway to air carriers opened up when Southwest uncovered buried treasure. The only air carrier to post profits and growth every year since its founding 25 years ago, Southwest purchased Utah-based Morris Air at the end of 1993. A little while later the airline surveyed its new assets and learned about a ticketless reservation system built by Evans while he was at Morris. After an inquiry from a European airline, Evans launched Open Skies a few months later to sell a rewritten version of the Morris reservation systems to other airlines while consulting with a growing HP 3000 staff at Southwest. Now more than 70 HP 3000s are running across the Southwest operation, including one at each airport Southwest serves and 11 working in reservation centers across the US.

The business Open Skies is winning for the HP 3000 at airlines such as AirTran in the US, Virgin Express in Europe and WestJet in Canada comes at the expense of other platforms. “Our advantage is that our system works,” Evans said. “We’ve replaced our competitors’ systems because of the reliability and speed of the HP 3000.”

While the 3000 may not align with preconceived notions of an open system, Evans says Open Skies replies by telling new prospects “it’s interoperable with other systems. When we sell it there’s usually a period where the customer says, ‘Wait a minute, everybody’s going with Unix. What’s this HP 3000 stuff?’ We show them the customers that have been up for years on the system without ever being down. Talking with those customers usually answers their questions about the 3000.”

Overseas prospects offer even more growth opportunities for Open Skies, especially in the Far East. A deal with a Japanese airline is ready to close, and Evans said there’s real growth in mainland China, too. Evans estimates China has only as many aircraft today as Southwest. The country has a populace many times that of the US, and those citizens are beginning to travel like Western counterparts. Although he said HP’s Japanese subsidiary has been reluctant to sell 3000s, Evans points to strong HP 3000 resellers in Taiwan as key partners in making HP 3000s available for Pacific Rim growth. “For airlines, China is the next growth capital of the world,” he said.

The Open Skies application is built mostly in COBOL and uses TurboIMAGE as its database. A GUI-based booking module for reservation agents communicates to the HP 3000 via Berkley sockets and C. “We’ve written our communication server in C, and COBOL makes calls to the API sockets, and the GUI is in C++,” Evans said. A reservation management system is also GUI-based, as is a kiosk check-in system that’s working at WestJet in Calgary, Alberta. Fliers on WestJet can select their own seats from a touchscreen, swiping with the credit card they made reservations with or keying in a booking number. The kiosk prints out a boarding card without any intervention from booking agents.

The application also has an Internet booking GUI for the true end-user, written with JavaScript and perl scripts. It communicates via sockets to the HP 3000. An HP 9000 acts as a Web server for the application, handling communications for Virgin Express customers who want to reserve their own tickets over the Internet.

When the new business appears through Open Skies efforts, it can range from a small Series 918 to a several Series 969 multiprocessor systems. “It’s a great fit for airlines because of the speed and reliability,” Evans said. “A reservation system isn’t big on number crunching – it’s raw I/O and mostly online users.”

Noteworthy evidence

If you’re a lover of classical music or the performing arts in the US and Canada, there’s a good chance an HP 3000 was involved in getting you a seat. Gary Biggs’ service firm Performing Technologies has fine-tuned its PACT/iX application for use in 38 symphonies, operas, ballets and arts organizations, starting with the Dallas Opera 15 years ago and now including ballets and symphonies in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, New York, Phoenix, Cleveland and Baltimore, as well as the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.



	“One of the things we like about the 3000 is it’s so scalable. I can go from a 918 with eight users to anything I need. I sure as heck can’t do that with Windows NT.”

These kinds of non-profit organizations are sometimes operating on such lean margins there’s no formal MIS staff, so the computer they choose needs to be extremely reliable and simple to maintain. Arts organizations are also notoriously underfunded in many cases, so a cost-effective computer system is essential. The HP 3000 meets both needs for dozens of these organizations.

“We’re extremely happy with the HP 3000,” Biggs said. “They run and run, have survived the San Francisco earthquake and a major fire in the Boston Symphony when Edison’s original wiring burned up a few years ago.”

Biggs began creating his application when the Dallas Opera landed Mellon Foundation money for computers in the early 1980s while he served on the opera’s board of directors. Later he revised the application to serve San Francisco’s symphony, an entity that sold $14 million more in tickets each year than the Dallas Opera. The application continues to bring HP 3000s online, sometimes where PCs have been struggling to keep up with the task of selling tens of thousands of tickets each year.

During one Sunday afternoon in Denver last year, the arts center booked $750,000 of business using PACT/iX. The software can access SuperCharge, a Performing Technologies product that creates an automated direct link to credit card authorization networks, making HP 3000 DTC controllers linked to modems behave as if they are Zon credit card terminals.

From its roots as a QUIZ application in 1982, PACT/iX has been enhanced and modified to use IMAGE/SQL tables, ODBC access and the latest links to popular PC-based reporting clients. Biggs said “one rather monumental COBOL program” that does ticket selling and fundraising is getting access to the latest end-user tools.

“We are embedding taking multitasked QUIZ reports and converting them to structured views within the IMAGE/SQL environment,” Biggs said. “It’s revolutionizing the way we do reporting. It provides essential store for both QUIZ reports, and by encapsulating all this logic into cascading views and stored procedures, we can also execute Microsoft Access and Crystal Reports.”

Since the company is more service than product-based, seating charts are available to ticket sellers in graphical format using custom-rolled VPlus screens that Performing Technologies designs. “We go way outside VPlus in some cases, to do pop-up windows and get us around some GUI interface routines,” Biggs said.

His current work on PACT/iX will Web-enable the application. “Selling tickets over the Internet is a pretty sexy application,” Biggs said. “Most of our customers operate fairly large boiler-room phone order centers. If we can take on some of that load, it’s a cost savings.”

Even arts organizations experience growth, and Biggs says the 3000 handles it well. “One of the things we like about the 3000 is it’s so scalable,” he said. “I can go from a 918 with eight users to anything I need. I sure as heck can’t do that with Windows NT.”

Pacing business growth

HP 3000 growth has been revolving around the healthcare industry for several years, relying on health maintenance organization (HMO) software from Amisys Healthcare. But the growth is beginning to displace other computer solutions including those as legendary for customer satisfaction as the HP 3000.

At the Family Health Plan HMO in Toledo, Ohio, an HP 3000 is doing the work that was handled in 1996 by an AS/400. MIS Director Sam Partin says he replaced the system well-known for its customer loyalty with an HP 3000 because of an MPE/iX application’s ability to better keep up with business opportuities.

The application is from Amisys, the source of many a new HP 3000 through its ability to replace existing healthcare computer systems. At Family Health Plan, it was an AS/400 which had been working for 10 years that got put out to pasture last year – because it wasn’t as adept at taking on new HMO businesses in third-party administration (TPA) and physician’s hospital organizations (PHOs).

“We felt the Amisys system was better suited to our business goals and plans, because of the flexibility and the market share.” Partin said. “When we found out the expansion plans and growth potential, we said our current system wouldn’t do the job we’ll need in the next five to 10 years.” The CaseCare application that was working on the AS/400 didn’t have TPA and PHO options “because these are new lines of business for us,” Partin said. Historical claims data still resides on the AS/400, but no new transactions are being fed into the system.

Partin said market share also played a role in selecting the Amisys solution. “It seemed to be the Number One HMO software package by choice,” he said. “That gave us a feeling of comfort that it would be around a while – and there’s some user groups that can influence the development process proceeds.”

In addition to a Series 928 for in-house report development, more than 200 users work on a new Series 969, including some of the first users to access a system from a remote city in the Mercy Health Partners System. The Mercy organization extends from Western Pennsylvania through Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee. Family Health Plan is the insurance division of the Mercy group, and now acts as a processing point for other partners in the system.

“We have people in some of our other cities that are using the HP 3000 for entering data such as authorizations through our network,” Partin said. Claims from PHOs in other cities around the Mercy organization are received and processed in Toledo on the HP 3000. But it wasn’t the computer platform’s superiority that led to IBM’s setback in Toledo.

“Hardware became secondary,” Partin said. “First of all we wanted to run our business, and whatever we needed to support that business plan is what [hardware] we chose. The AS/400 is a great machine, but we heard some good things about the HP 3000 as well.”

Teaching a growth lesson

While some growth is taking place because the 3000 applications are flexible, other opportunities for 3000s take place through acquisitions. When one company buys another, it can change the acquired company’s business processes to match its existing software solutions.

The largest distributor of school supplies and furniture in the US has been expanding its HP 3000 use while unplugging AS/400s. School Specialty of Appleton, Wis. has been acquiring school supply companies for the past four years as it’s expanded its revenues to $220 million. The company does business with half of the 100,000 school buildings in the US. “Our best-selling writing instrument is a crayon,” said VP of Operations Mike Killoren, “and our best-selling paper is construction paper.”

Along the way to that growth, six AS/400s have been displaced by a single Series 979/400 HP 3000. “We buy companies, and most of them tend to be AS/400 shops,” Killoran said. “We end up taking those systems out and expanding our capacity on the 3000 to support those additional companies.”

School Specialty uses the System For Distributors (SFD) application from Distribution Resources Company (303.889.4500, www.DistributionResources.com). HP 3000s have served the company since 1988, running a site license for Minisoft terminal emulation products as well as the FrontMan and Middleman middleware solutions. The Minisoft solutions help the company create custom reports and order entry modules that complement the SFD application.

Killoren said School Specialty converts AS/400 data from IBM databases for use in TurboIMAGE.

“The systems conversion is a big part of our integration of new companies,” he said. “We typically don’t try to keep their applications the way they were running. We change the way they do business to the way our applications run.”

Although School Specialty is working with Windows NT servers for Exchange e mail and network management, NT is no threat to the company’s core applications. A menuing and e-mail system from TAG Solutions is more widely used than Exchange among School Specialty users. “In the short term I don’t see that [NT] would replace our HP 3000 applications,” Killoren said.