Dancing with Big Blue Wolves

A foreign correspondent reports on IBM's latest efforts to win 3000 customers

By Alan Yeo

The New Year has come and gone, and I’m about to set off on my 2004 migration trail. Hopefully that means I again get to meet fellow HP 3000 travellers at events like the Solutions Symposium, HP World, and a plethora of migration-related seminars. This year it also looks like there may be a few new faces trying to attract our attention, judging by some recent press advertising and the final event I recall attending in 2003.

It was 4 a.m. and what did I need most? Coffee, nicotine, more sleep! “Why am I doing this?” echoed through my head as I struggled to consciousness. I was just about to set off on what I hoped would be my last migration expedition of 2003, for the second time into Germany. But this time I was really going into foreign territory.

IBM — “Big Blue” to us 3000 customers who knew them from years ago — was rounding up representatives from the European HP 3000 ISV and VAR community as part of its campaign to attract HP 3000 users. IBM was putting on an event in Stuttgart to pitch its iSeries servers as a good new home for 3000 customers. And believe me, these guys were serious about it!

They had shipped in their major Europe-Middle East-Africa” ISV channel reps to tell about and sell the iSeries market story. IBM’s Doug Fulmer was also on hand from the iSeries headquarters in Rochester, Minn. to explain the technology and to impart some of the family history and folklore behind the iSeries, or AS/400 as many of us think of it. Fulmer gave enthusiastic, in-depth briefings on the iSeries to a group of leading US HP 3000 consultants in 2002 in Rochester, as reported by John Burke in the June, 2002 3000 NewsWire.

My IBM programming days are many years ago, pre-AS/400, in fact even prior to its predecessor the System 38, back in the old System 34/36 days. So my conception of the iSeries was that it was a rebadged AS/400, rather like the HP 3000 became the HP e3000 — and that the AS/400 was sort of akin to the HP 3000, but without the robustness. I considered it to be an installed-base, proprietary platform that was just awaiting the inevitable decline and eventual axe by IBM.

That the iSeries could be a potential migration platform hadn’t really entered my thinking. After all, I have spent the last two years developing migration tools and working with other migration-focused people and companies to help move HP 3000 applications to the “open” world of Unix, Linux and Windows.

However, from doing some work with the folks at Chicago-based PIR Group I had picked up some vibes about the iSeries. PIR had demonstrated an HP 3000 to iSeries migration at HP World 2003 (see “PIR Group enjoins a jump” in the October, 2003 NewsWire). But I certainly wasn’t going to Stuttgart with anything more than casual curiosity, and if the “deal” to go hadn’t been so good, I probably wouldn’t have gone. So let’s say at the least, this was a skeptic who flew out of a grey and cold English pre-dawn morning toward southern Germany.

Stuttgart dawned even colder, but bright. Bummed a cab ride with a fellow attendee I met at the airport to the IBM complex, to disembark at the same time as a number of other 3000 community “names” arrived from their IBM-arranged hotel. Now I wouldn’t say that we had met frequently over the past couple of years, travelling the world in pursuit of the Migration Grail, but the cry did go up “It’s Tuesday, it must be Stuttgart.”

The morning program was “Marketing.” Now I’m not going to do anyone else’s marketing for them, but I will say that I definitely had some pre-conceptions shattered about the size and growth — yes, I did say “growth” — of the iSeries market. Also these guys really do want to make it attractive for HP 3000 users to change their favorite color to blue (although to be accurate, the iSeries servers are black). So don’t be surprised if you get a knock on your door soon. Perhaps it might also serve as a wake-up call to some people who have, may we say, been slightly complacent about wining your future business.

But I suspect that, like me, it’s the iSeries systems that you are more interested in than their marketing. So here are some of the highlights as espoused by Doug Fuller, IBM Worldwide iSeries Sales Executive. Did I say Sales? No, this guy was a techie. Imagine one of your favorite HP 3000 experts enthusing about the HP 3000, but just substitute the word iSeries. We heard the same stories about fierce customer loyalty, boxes working while shut away in cupboards un-discovered for years, boxes exposed to tornados or accidents with forklift trucks that just came back up when the power was restored. Okay, got the picture.

Tech highlights

I’m not going to do a technical pitch for the iSeries, but I’ll just highlight a few things from a 3000 perspective. Firstly, the iSeries isn’t just a rebadged AS/400, it does have the OS400 operating system, but is also capable of being partitioned and also concurrently running, Linux, Windows, and AIX (IBM’s Unix). It comes as standard with the DB2 database, a CI-like command language for JCL, a spooler and a job scheduler. The servers range from a small $10,000 single-processor, 20-30 user model up to a mainframe sized, million-dollar 32-processor model capable of supporting thousands of users.

Of course, like a number of others in the audience I was interested in the options that IBM might have lined up to help people migrate to the iSeries. And on day two there were presentations from Transoft and PIR Group on their migration solutions.

Transoft claimed extensive experience in migrations to iSeries, and with their Legacy Liberator tools provides a complete HP 3000 migration service to the iSeries running in either Linux or AIX modes. Transoft has two migration options for TurboIMAGE, using either their TDAM technology — which uses an IMAGE Intrinsic Library to integrate with DB2 — or by converting the IMAGE calls in COBOL to embedded SQL.

Transoft uses either Microfocus or Acucorp’s ACUCOBOL-GT for code migration. VPlus is converted via Transoft’s Graphical Adapter tools, and can be either character based or Browser based, whilst JCL is converted into the relevant Unix shell scripts.

Rather than migrating to AIX or Linux, a completely different approach is taken by PIR Group to migrate HP 3000 applications. PIR provides a migration to the Native OS400 environment. Christian Schneider from PIR said OS400 should feel like a home away from home for HP 3000 developers, for PIR the Native iSeries is their HP 3000. PIR can also claim many years experience in migrations to the iSeries from a variety of other platforms.

PIR’s migration also uses the native iSeries database DB2, within which they have implemented a TurboIMAGE structure. IMAGE calls are retained and resolved by a replacement IMAGE Intrinsic Library, whilst code conversion is made directly into the iSeries Native ILE COBOL. VPlus screens get converted into standard DDS screens formats, which after migration can be enhanced to Graphical or Web Based formats using tools like WebSphere. JCL and CI commands are converted into their OS400-equivalent CL formats, and print spooling is handled again by the Native Spool Management system of the iSeries.

In summary, it may have been a skeptic who flew into Germany, but it was nice to hear people enthusing about a computer again, and talking about the future of it. IBM would certainly like to convince us that the iSeries would be a good new home for an HP 3000 user — either as a multiple operating system platform running Linux, AIX, Windows, or as a very solid OS400 environment.

They do have some good arguments. The iSeries has certainly gotten the development dollars of IBM behind it to keep it current and capable of keeping its head up in the modern technology world. With PIR Group and Transoft, they have a couple of partners that could get you there.

Alan Yeo is founder of ScreenJet Ltd. and Affirm, UK-based companies which specialize in HP 3000 connectivity, consulting and migration support.