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HP lines up 3000 vendors for IA-64 ports

CSY could point to its designated market leaders for mail order, manufacturing, credit unions and airlines as riders on the new IA-64 platform for 3000s. Smith Gardner & Associates, eXegySys, Summit Information Systems and Open Skies all weighed in with press statements outlining their support for the new architecture on 3000s. HP also made statements about support from leading healthcare application providers – but a press statement from the Amisys Payor Group of HBO & Company didn’t appear in the HP presentation.

CSY General Manager Harry Sterling explained that the supplier of the most widely installed healthcare application on 3000s told HP “it’s not their policy to do press releases” about future technologies. “It’s not an Amisys situation, it’s an HBOC situation.”

Winston Prather, the CSY R&D manager, noted that CSY’s IA-64 press release “talks about them – it just doesn’t list them by name.” The release stated that “HP is working with the leading IT providers that specifically address the information management needs of the healthcare industry.”

The early announcements – from vendors who clearly won’t have software running under an MPE for IA-64 until well beyond 2000 – were part of HP’s package designed to show the system has the application support that can assure its future growth.

Analyst Andy Butler of the Gartner Group reported in a spring article that the 3000’s prospects were no better than the number of software companies willing to take on IA-64 development, should such technology be planned for the system. Sterling said that the analyst’s report would be updated for a brighter outlook pending the arrival of more software.

“He said that if we could show at the time of our [IA-64] announcement that software vendors were committed to us, he would probably change his article sometime in the summer,” Sterling said. “We have commitments from most of our vertical market software vendors to move forward with us on IA-64.”

HP plans to publish a comprehensive list of vendors committed to IA-64 support on the HP 3000, but at the time of the July 20 announcement “we haven’t had the time to put it all together,” Sterling said.

Customers who are using applications outside of the five target verticals – airlines, credit unions, manufacturing, mail order and healthcare – can still expect HP to support their continued use of the 3000, Sterling said.

“That doesn’t mean we’re going to abandon those customers,” he said. “These five markets are the ones [in which] we can believe we can get a lot of new business. It has nothing to do with existing customers or DARs outside of these areas and still very strong. Our focus from factory marketing dollars will be on these five verticals.”

Prather said CSY will be supporting “any and all of the ISVs on the 3000, but the distinction is that these are five vertical markets that are experiencing significant growth.” He added that HP believes the companies named “are clearly the dominant providers in their spaces,” so CSY isn’t looking for additional partners for the target verticals.

“We’ll continue to explore, but I don’t see a need to be that opportunistic,” Prather said. “The news to a lot of the analysts is the growth opportunities for the product line.”

“We’re serious about getting new business for the HP 3000,” Sterling added.

IA-64 ports less critical

Sterling said that vendors like those in the key verticals “don’t even need to recompile their binaries to run on the IA-64 architecture. Our best guess is that there’s only going to be about a 10-percent performance hit for those who don’t recompile, because the operating system and databases will all be in Native Mode. Only 10 percent of the performance code path is actually spent in user code.”

Sterling said that if a DAR didn’t want to support both an MPE/iX version and an IA-64 version of programs, “they can choose to keep the MPE/iX version and it will run on the IA-64 architecture.”

Shifting to a new architecture in 1987 for its first RISC design, HP levied a much higher performance hit from vendors who didn’t recompile their code. “We were right up against the performance wall then, and we were being forced to go to the new architecture prematurely,” Sterling said. “That’s the not the case with IA-64.” Sterling and Prather said that the new EPIC design in IA-64 has more in common with PA-RISC than PA-RISC ever had with the old stack-based MPE V designs.

HP advantages in IA-64

Experience in compiler optimization is much more extensive this time around, Sterling added. “It took three to four years before we really got good at it back then, but HP definitely has an advantage in this transition,” he said. “Some of the other vendors going to IA-64 don’t have the compiler optimization expertise. That’s why I’m confident that right out of the chute our operating system and databases will be higher performing in this transition than the last time.”

Prather noted that competing technologies for IA-64 look to him like they labor under some doubts about their future. IBM’s decision to sell its interest in the Somerset Design Center back to Motorola “sure makes me wonder” about PowerPC, Prather said. And Compaq’s plans to continue Alpha development seem less than certain. “The question becomes, what is their long-term computing strategy?”