Ecometry takes steps toward next platform

App leader for new 3000s prepares new features that won’t hit MPE versions

Benchmarking HP 3000s is over at Ecometry, but at the same time the company’s 300-plus MPE/iX sites are looking for newer versions of the 3000 to get them through the next end-of year sales bonanza. The situation shows the paradox for customers of the e-commerce and catalog sales application Ecometry. Known as MACS from Smith-Gardner through its 15 years of service to the community, the app created more new 3000 customers than any other during the last five years. Now that HP’s sales of the HP 3000 have ended, the application vendor is moving on to the prospects of Windows and HP-UX installations.

It is making its move in advance of its customers, like every other migrating 3000 ISV. Packaged application vendors have displayed the greatest enthusiasm for HP’s move to migrate from the 3000, and several key players have already released non-3000 versions of their apps. Ecometry recently shipped a version of its Web commerce, retail and catalog application that signals the beginning of the end of its HP 3000 developments.

More than 90 percent of the Ecometry installed base is still using HP 3000s, and only a handful have migrated away from the platform after two years. But the most popular platform for Ecometry’s new installations is currently Windows, not HP-UX. The new 5.4.3 release of the application brings these open systems users some features that the 3000 sites have had for awhile. The company’s CEO said the next Ecometry releases will bring the application’s non-3000 users new features that the vendor will not offer in the releases still used by the majority of its customer base.

“With Ecometry 7.0, MPE will really start to be more behind,” than the open systems releases, said CEO John Marrah. “We’re not building new pieces of functionality in MPE. All those are pretty much going open systems.”

Despite the improvements, nine of every 10 Ecometry sites are still using the HP 3000, and Marrah said the customers are trying to get their hands on newer 3000 systems. The upgrades have not been as simple as when Ecometry could supply the hardware. “We will recommend them to Phoenix 3000, and the different used suppliers out there in the marketplace,” Marrah said. “Obviously the Internet is a great search source for that hardware, too.”

The vendor continues to compare its most recent benchmarks running under Oracle and HP-UX to application benchmarks conducted under the slower generation HP 3000 hardware. These marks make the implementations using these 3000s — Series 9x9 systems, rather than the speedier N-Class and A-Class boxes — look slow by comparison.

The benchmarks probably reflect the state of most Ecometry shops, however, because of the rarity of N-Class and A-Class installations.

Ecometry won’t be updating its 3000 benchmarks to reflect the hardware that its customers are trying to purchase. “The N-Class is a great box, but we’re not planning on doing any more MPE benchmarks at this point,” Marrah said.

The shift away from the 3000 means less hardware profits for Ecometry. “We’re doing very little Windows hardware business, because the margins just aren’t there,” Marrah said. Profits from hardware installations made up a significant part of the company’s revenues during its most successful years, which centered around the dot-com boom. The company has committed to sourcing its Unix hardware exclusively from HP.

Season of change

A typical Ecometry site can only consider a migration away from the 3000 or onto a faster MPE system from now until late summertime, since most of these companies do massive business around the end-of-year holidays. So far, few of those who have made a shift have chosen HP Unix systems.

“We only have four customers who have chosen Unix so far,” Marrah said, out of more than 30 who are non-3000 platforms. The company tuned its HP-UX versions for Oracle — “a lot of tuning,” Marrah said, with three in-house Oracle developers still at work there — during the past two years. Its most recent benchmarks are with Oracle running under Windows, the database/platform combination that’s been most popular to date among non-3000 sites.

Ecometry has also released a SQL Server version of its product, running under Windows, that shows similar performance to the Oracle under Windows version. Despite the turn toward these environments, Marrah said the company will keep working on its MPE/iX releases, too.

“We’re going to be working on the MPE version through 2006,” he said. “We’ll be doing bug fixes, upgrades to credit card functionality, things like changes for UPS rate formats. If specific customers have enhancement requests, we’ll surely entertain those also.”

The Ecometry experience will include third party products, even on the open systems platforms. Marrah said MPE had scheduling capabilities that the outside products may perform “much better than we could” with MPE. Windows-bound migration sites who are using Robelle’s Suprtool in 3000 shops will make do “with SQL,” he added, since so far Robelle hasn’t decided to port Suprtool to Windows.

Carrying Suprtool, a superior way to query databases for reports, over to Windows involves the same kinds of choices all migrating HP 3000 sites are studying. Robelle’s CEO Bob Green said Suprtool needs conversion tools that are just emerging, since the product is written in a modern version of the 3000’s SPL called SPLash.

“To go to AIX or Windows or Linux, we need a new Splash compiler (never), or a Splash to C conversion,” he said. “[Ordina] Denkart thinks they have tools that can do this and make code we can maintain, but we have our doubts.” Ecometry sites going to HP-UX can use Suprtool on that platform.

Where the Ecometry customers are headed “is a religious discussion,” Marrah said, “a personal feeling about what you want to do and how you want to manage your enterprise. We believe the product will perform on either platform, and that Oracle is faster than SQL Server today. Tomorrow could be different.” Windows will mandate more servers, while HP-UX will demand fewer, but larger systems.

SQL Server and Oracle will cost about the same for many sites, Marrah added, “since they’ll need an upgrade to SQL Enterprise Edition pretty quick. We’ll work with either database. It’s amazing the transformations that have taken place here. Four years ago it was ‘We’re an MPE house; why would we want to play with those guys? They can’t be anywhere near as fast as IMAGE.’ Now it’s ‘Man oh man, look what we can do.’ ”t