It’s a good thing that the HP 3000 division supports its third parties’ role so well, because HP’s partners are reaching out to help e3000 customers who use HP’s products to manage IMAGE databases. Lots of them have been trying to get by with HP’s change management program DBChange Plus, software that’s fallen further behind the e3000’s capabilities every time HP improves the IMAGE database. DBChange is installed on lots of HP 3000s, however, because HP has been bundling it into systems on a regular basis — so it becomes something that gets sold as an included feature. Customers might even be surprised to learn that it’s on their HP 3000 now, and that they’re paying maintenance on it.

The maintenance fees on the product have become an issue over the last two years, because customers are learning that HP isn’t going to be doing much more than maintenance repairs on the program. HP discussed this enhancement-free policy at the last two IPROF meetings. When a program falls behind the database its supposed to manage, and maintenance drops down to bug fixes, it says a lot about the program’s future. This is where the e3000 division’s support of third parties works to resolve customer complaints. Adager is offering all DBChange sites a free license of its Adager Model 2, the full power version that handles things like b-trees, jumbo datasets, dynamic dataset expansion (for both detail and master datasets) and third party indexing (TPI). DBChange handles none of these recent advances in the IMAGE/SQL database, and b-trees alone can give your HP 3000 a 10-times performance boost. Getting that functionality for free from Adager will be a transition as painless as possible, since Adager is including a utility that transforms DBChange command files into Adager jobstreams. “The biggest investment customers make is usually in the routine batch jobs they run,” said Adager CEO Rene Woc. Amisys made the change from DBChange several years ago, switching its healthcare sites to Adager.

Getting a $6,500 license for free (the same price for everybody, regardless of how big their HP 3000 is) does have a few limits, albeit not serious ones. Adager is asking DBChange customers to contact them by December 31 to get the free Model 2 license. And the company requires the DBchange sites sign on for support at $1,000 a year. Considering how legendary the Adager support is in the e3000 community — tales of midnight support are commonplace, where Adager engineers help resolve HP e3000 problems sometimes unrelated to Adager’s own software — that maintenance fee looks like a great way to back up a support organization.

The DBChange situation shows the HP 3000 division continues to look out for its customers by encouraging its third parties to offer alternatives. In a different era of the 3000, long before the e was added, HP cared more about competing on things like database utilities. e3000 division general manager Winston Prather said it best when he explained, “To continue to be successful I need to do less bundling and including, and more relying on third parties to complete the overall solution.” DBChange customers can do that completing by contacting Adager at info@adager.com,calling 800.533.7346 from North America or 208.726.9100 from the rest of the world.