Almost two-thirds of the migrating customers responding to the Interex user group’s Customer Needs Survey of this fall said they weren’t going to be off their HP 3000s before the end of 2004. As if that timeline wasn’t enough to give migration vendors cause for pause, there’s the statistic that more than half of the surveyed customer base doesn’t even expect to start migration until 2004. The poll, which anybody could fill out anonymously by interacting with a Web page, also showed that one in four 3000 customers have already decided to stay on the platform. Ken Sletten, chairman of the SIG-IMAGE/SQL Special Interest Group, said that way the questions were asked on the user group’s survey tilted the responses in favor of a migration picture.

When Interex asked how many customers had decided to migrate, 39.3 percent replied they were still studying a Transition plan. Sletten said that number looks like it got lumped in among those who plan to migrate — even though a Transition plan could well include an option to use the emulators coming from the OpenMPE movement, or to freeze their 3000 on a stable version of MPE. “It seems to assume that 100 percent of those currently still gathering info on transitioning will end up moving off MPE,” he said. “At the very least it seems like that the 39.3 percent ‘still gathering’ should be divided up in proportion to the ‘decision split’ so far; i.e., 25.1 percent are planning to stay on MPE. and 35.6 percent are planning, implementing, budgeted or have completed a transition.”

Sletten, who sits on the pro-homesteading OpenMPE board of directors, applied what he called a more realistic formula to the “still gathering” group and got a total of more than 40 percent of customers remaining on MPE. “It seems reasonable to project that significantly more MPE users plan to stay on MPE than HP was recently touting,” he added. That bigger homesteading base could mean more development of MPE software from vendors. Even some vendors who’ve long been in the 3000 market are counting on revenues from migration. But the Interex results seem to show the migrating customers’ budgets may be on the lean side.

Optomists as always, more than half of the customers who took the Interex survey guessed they’d be spending less than $250,000 on migration consulting, currently the chief hope for revenues among the many advisors and Platinum partners prospecting in the 3000 customer base. Half the customers think they’ll spend no more than a quarter-million dollars extra on hardware, and three-fourths of those migrating are only going to budget an additional $250,000 or less for software to replace their 3000 environment. The prospects for migration tools seemed most restrained, according to the Interex survey: more than half the respondents thought they’d spend between zero and $100,000 on tools like those from Denkart and Neartek. Less than half of those moving are headed to the HP 9000. The chief reason for that HP choice? “It’s the path of least resistance.” Loyalty to HP came in third among reasons; “Attractive price/performance incentives” ranked fifth. One in 10 migrating customers said they were headed to IBM systems when they make their Transition.