MANMAN sites face enhancement sunset

SSA-GT tells customers it will curtail ERP application development

MANMAN customers got a second dose of the future this fall, this time from their application provider. After being told last autumn their hardware maker wanted to get out of the HP 3000 business, users of the ERP suite for HP and Digital systems learned from SSA Global Technologies their application won’t be getting more features or enhancements by way of major releases.

The move was the latest in a line of halts that packaged application providers have announced to the HP 3000 customer base. SSA’s announcement also impacted Digital OpenVMS users of the application. HP owns both the 3000 and the OpenVMS market, but has not announced its exit from the OpenVMS business. SSA-GT made the announcement at its Global Partner conference in Las Vegas.

MANMAN customers and service providers estimate that the installed base still using MANMAN on the 3000 is at least 300 sites. Austin, Texas-based The Support Group Inc. serves much of the North American base with supplemental and primary third-party application support. TSG president Terry Floyd said the SSA announcement feels just like HP’s 3000 directive of last fall, at least in some ways.

“They haven’t killed the product yet, not really,” Floyd said, “or said they’re going to stop supporting it. But the parallels between MPE and MANMAN’s expiration are amazing.”

Floyd said the MANMAN user community now needs the same kinds of things that HP 3000 customers are seeking from HP. “SSA has the same issues,” Floyd said, “transfer of MANMAN licenses between customers; upgrades of hardware. They’ve got to enable that.”

SSA left the door open for future enhancements, but said they would be released one by one as bug fixes are released, and not in a “version upgrade.” While Floyd said that freezing enhancements wasn’t the same thing as killing the application, “it certainly will be interpreted that way.”

CAMUS, a user group of MRP and ERP customers with a strong MANMAN focus, issued a statement just after the SSA announcement which noted that SSA left open some possibility of continuing MANMAN enhancements.

“When pressed on the issue of stopping development for MANMAN, SSA representatives were willing to accept possible alternatives,” Jeff Adams, VP of CAMUS, wrote in a message to members. “The only condition for ongoing development is that it is economically feasible. As a result, MANMAN users interested in extending the life of MANMAN through development efforts — whether enhancements to the product itself, or the addition of value-added features such as e-commerce, portals, etc., must come together and agree on reasonable alternatives to the end of MANMAN development.” Some users of the application are talking about how they could take over the application code, and put it in the hands of more enthusiastic owners.

CAMUS hosted a conference call of MANMAN customers in late October to talk about options to keep MANMAN enhancements flowing. SSA’s CEO Mike Greenough said the company will let MANMAN sites trade license for license to other ERP packages the company offers: BPCS, KBM, PRMS, MAX+ and MK.

Enhancement freezes don’t always lead to product cancellations. Providers of the Amisys/3000 application froze enhancements in the healthcare app for more than 18 months while the providers shopped for a buyer for the customer base. The acquiring company then made plans to enhance the MPE software — plans that were changed when HP announced last fall it will exit the marketplace in 2006. Earlier this year Amisys announced that its 11.01 version of the HP 3000 application for healthcare would be the last MPE release.

HP has convinced many of these packaged application vendors to stop HP 3000 development, sometimes by spreading concerns about the future of the 3000’s ecosystem. MANMAN’s 3000 customer base, probably the largest in number in the 3000 community, might be among the first to make a case for continuing with their application beyond their vendors’ plans — simply because so many of the sites are already outside of SSA’s support. Making the picture more complex is the fact that SSA is a strong provider in the IBM iSeries marketplace, where BPCS is a major contender.

SSA told customers at its Global Client Forum that sites on support can move license for license to any of the other SSA products. But for the 3000 sites, that means a shift away from their computer environment. SSA makes no other 3000 software, and its 12.0 version of MANMAN will be its last.

In a bit of irony, CAMUS president Warren Smith said that his company finds the freeze on MANMAN releases something of a relief.

“The ‘No new Versions’ statement by SSA simplifies our program development and modification process,” he said in a letter to members. “No longer do I need to be as careful when making mods, so they will not interfere with future releases. So far to date, no modifications have touched the core database (we are at 11.3). This has caused additional costs in the past, which we now will not see. I am still considering the impact of core system modifications until the dust settles over the next few months — we will still stick to the path of no database changes for the near term.”

The prior owners of MANMAN, Computer Associates, haven’t exactly been generous with enhancements over the last decade, according to Smith. “In the past 10 years we have seen few CA supplied enhancements — for the few enhancements that I would like to have, we either have already coded them years ago, or can add it to our internal list or utilize third parties.”

The departure of customers from support and the typical customer’s willingness to modify code could paint a different picture in this app provider’s sunset. SSA might be leaving the 3000 application space not with a bang, but a whisper. Terry Simpkins, Applications Director at Measurement Specialties, Inc., said enhancements were down to a trickle anyway.

“As for enhancements, no, it couldn’t get much slower,” he said. “I think SSA has underestimated the rate at which they will lose support customers, now that the announcement has been made that new features won’t be coming to any significant degree.”

Simpkins, who remains a strong advocate of using the HP 3000 and MANMAN, said SSA identified HP as the chicken which laid the egg in this ecosystem shift.

“They said that HP has forced this action through its EOL of the HP 3000 line,” Simpkins said. “SSA-GT will continue to provide support for MANMAN as long as one person is willing to pay for support, and SSA-GT can get hardware to use.”