Number 94 (Update of Volume 9, Issue 3)

HP opens holding company for intellectual property

HP's delays in getting the MPE/iX source into the OpenMPE movement have been rooted in many things, but a lack of infrastructure is high on the list of roadblocks. Until last week, the company didn't have much in place to collect royalties for things it has invented, like the 3000's operating system. That has made it tough for HP's legal eagles to release MPE to an outside company.

That roadblock might be lifted since HP has set up an organization to collect royalties and license its intellectual property. The new organization will start by trying to collect revenues from companies that are infringing on HP patents. HP sees a royalty payment -- ultra-profitable revenue if ever there was any -- as a good alternative to an infringement lawsuit.

(Not all such lawsuits go HP's way, either. The company just lost a victory on appeal in Delaware, when the Supreme Court there reinstated a suit over the EPIC technology at the core of the Itanium processor family. HP will now have to defend against a VLIW Technology trade secrets suit.)

Royalties can add to HP's bottom line, rather than force the company into court to protect its property. Steve Fox, HP vice president and deputy general counsel, intellectual property, said the company has been expanding its focus on intellectual property.

"After we added the word 'Invent' to our logo in December 1999, we launched a major effort to increase our intellectual property portfolio," said Fox. "

To take advantage of the portfolio - one of the largest in the IT industry - HP has formed a centralized IP licensing organization to drive overall strategy and increase revenue. The scope of the effort includes HP's entire IP portfolio of patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets.

"Historically, HP's intellectual property has provided value to the company in the form of innovative products and protection from our competitors," said Joe Beyers, vice president, intellectual property licensing. "This approach has served us well, but in many cases we have missed out on the opportunity to gain additional value from HP's inventions beyond product revenue. Capturing these additional opportunities is important to HP as the competitive environment in which we operate continues to intensify. Also, by making HP's intellectual property more broadly available, we can improve our collaboration with other companies."

HP already has several formal IP licensing efforts underway. While its current licensing efforts involve technology like LightScribe, which uses standard optical drives to print labels on CDs and DVDs, and Atomic Resolution Storage, a technology for high-density portable storage, MPE/iX may be an invention that HP would license to an organization like OpenMPE.

One snag in the way would be the need to generate revenue. HP is in the licensing business to bring cash into the company. So far, OpenMPE hasn't even developed a budget to pay for something like an IP license for MPE/iX source code. Since the Compaq merger, HP has put a new effort into identifying the value of its intellectual property.

HP called its initiative a way to "emphasize HP's new, strategic approach to intellectual property and increase the visibility, coordination and control of the company's IP assets. All of HP's IP has been moved into a separate, wholly owned holding company, which will be managed by the IP licensing organization.

The good news is that royalty payments for MPE/iX would probably benefit the 3000 community that will homestead. Financial benefit from licensing revenue will flow back to the business organizations that created the IP. That revenue could continue to fund HP lab staffers who can repair any deep MPE/iX bugs -- or at least assist the OpenMPE virtual lab.

Transact gets even more migration attention

For an HP 3000 development language that hasn't been sold into a new site in a decade, Transact is getting plenty of attention now. It's the migration era, after all, and everybody who's still on a 3000 is a potential customer for migration services firms.

Another of these companies announced a plan to save Transact users, when Transoft floated a press release that offers Transact to COBOL services as part of the Legacy Liberator package. The Legacy Liberator, generates COBOL code acceptable to open systems COBOL, according to Transoft officials. “The generated COBOL programs utilize Transoft's established libraries of MPE supporting functionality, especially VPLUS and IMAGE, enabling appropriate replications of TRANSACT runtime functionality.”

Just one month ago, ScreenJet Ltd. announced a T2C toolkit that performs conversions. Speedware had offered a migration path from Transact to its 4GL, too. Not bad for a language HP hasn’t sold in more than a decade.

Look for the less-crippled N-Class boxes

HP’s 3000 sales days are over, but customers are continuing to purchase the system from each other through brokers and other avenues. The most recent generation of systems bears some close scrutiny, however, if a site wants to get full value.

N-Class HP 3000s have long been crippled by HP code that slows the system processors below their rated clock speed. Not all of the N-Class units were clocked down, however.

Look to the top of the N-Class line for unfettered performance. The N-Class 440, using a PA-8500, the 550, using a PA-8600, and the 750, using a PA-8700, run at their full rated speeds. (That’s 440, 550 and 750 MHz respectively.) Everything for sale in the 3000’s PCI-based lineup has been clocked down. Don’t be too surprised if the prices on the uncrippled systems are higher. On the other hand, that could mean the rest of the N-Class boxes should be lower in comparison.

EBay nets less than $700 for 918

Even though a used N-Class system that’s uncrippled will still cost upwards of six figures to uncrate, the HP 3000 can quickly become an even better value with the passage of time. This month a Series 918RX system appeared on eBay. This was a computer that cost more than $20,000 when new. ViTrack, an asset recovery firm, managed to get $660 for the system that included a 20 user license for MPE, IMAGE and Allbase, 256Mb of memory, two 2Gb disks, and a DDS tape drive. The seller even had enough documentation to qualify for a license transfer.

Blake Koepke at ViTrack said his company runs across HP 3000s when firms clear out their IT departments. Most of these systems are sold offline, but this entry-level computer, powerful enough to support 100 users, took its bow on eBay. Koepke said the buyer didn’t need a license transfer, so this HP 3000 may have been purchased for its parts. While a $660 price isn’t typical, it does represent the strong value which the prior generation of HP 3000s still carry. A Series 918, after all, can boot even the latest 7.5 version of MPE/iX. Koepke said he had some Series 992 CPUs still for sale. You can contact ViTrack at 763-226-2102, or Koepke at Blake.Koepke@vitrack.com.

HP reorg may mix enterprise, support business

When we reported in the last Online Extra that HP had put Ann Livermore back in charge of its enterprise server group, we also included a note about the rest of Livermore’s HP organization. She’s still heading up the HP Services part of the vendor, the unit that sells support for HP’s servers. Gartner recently noted that the HP reorganization that combined support and enterprise business could confuse some customers.

The new group, called the Technology Solutions Group (TSG), sweeps up great stretches of some profitable HP business. (That would be the support operations, not the servers. At least not consistently; enterprise business bled red ink for years up until the last HP quarterly report.)

Gartner’s outlook said combining enterprise systems marketing and development with support operations might lead customers to think that HP Services is in the business of selling hardware. We have a very different take. This reorg puts the HP hardware groups alongside HP’s support business. As the HP 3000 customers have learned, support always outlasts hardware. Support and hardware were once such separate businesses at HP that the 3000 division couldn’t use a penny of the millions collected for MPE support. That’s all changed with this reorg. Now that these HP businesses are co-mingled, it may be hard to view a system sale as anything but a first step toward more profitable HP support contracts.

What a reprieve looks like: Microsoft and Win98

Want to see what a change of mind looks like about legacy technology? Look over the about-face that Microsoft just did for its Windows 98 users. The five-year-old PC environment was supposed to go off vendor support -- just like the HP 3000 -- this month. Instead, Microsoft started up a pay-per-call support service for Win98, which runs on about 20 percent of all PC-based Windows systems.

Microsoft hasn’t had great success in getting customers to upgrade every time it brings out a new Windows version. Once the migrating customers clear out of the 3000 space, the remaining customer base could represent the same share as Microsoft sees using Windows 98 or 95 (more than one-fourth, according to a AssetMatrix survey.)

There’s a good business reason for the Microsoft change of heart. Support is profitable in a way that software development or hardware sales can never be. Sell 100 contracts or 1,000, and your costs still revolve around how many people you need to resolve the problems -- not a per-customer cost of how many circuit boards you need to make, or the ingenuity expense of software designers to keep happy and productive. We can’t see into a crystal ball to 2006. But unless HP is using a different economic yardstick than Microsoft, the vendor might find some value in letting 3000 customers talk it into remaining in the support business. On a case-by-case basis, of course.

Getting perl to run on HP 3000s

For more than three months now, the 5.8.1 version of Perl has been available for the HP 3000. Customers who want the latest version of the superior scripting language, highly useful for Web design, have to compile the distribution themselves. HP’s Mark Bixby advised the customers they could get the source code for Perl on the 3000 from www.perl.com.

Putting together a binary distribution is the work that HP has left for customers to do themselves. Bixby also suggested that homesteading sites need to get used to creating their own binaries, for software like Apache, Samba and sendmail, too.

Getting perl to run on a 3000 can be less than intuitive for a customer not well-versed in the MPE shell. Donna Garverick posted a note that advised a couple of ways to get the language started:

“The 'MPE way' would be:

:run perl.pub.perl < prlprog
or
:run perl.pub.perl;info="prlprog"

The more Unix-y way would be go into the shell:

:sh
# perl my_script.pl
or
# my_script.pl

ORBiT gets customers to look at the calendar

ORBiT Software headed into the on-demand printing business with its 2004 calendar offer this month. The company said its calendars can be downloaded from the Web site at www.orbitsw.com, so customers can print their own on demand. The calendars sport pictures of a stately Golden Retriever,
a Sailboat on San Francisco Bay, the Blue Angels over San Francisco Bay, Half Dome at Yosemite, the Pacific Coast at Monterrey and Sunset over the Pacific

“These are large (3 to 4 Mb) high resolution files,” said ORBiT’s Cheri Martinez, “so if you’d rather not download, send us an e-mail to sales@orbitsw.com and we’ll print your favorite and mail it to you.”

ORBiT is also advising its customers to “see how you can get credits for your license fee investment in MPE software tools, if and when you migrate to UNIX or NT,” at www.orbitsw.com/USA/right_track.html