Number 92 (Update of Volume 9, Issue 1)

DISCUTIL looks out beyond HP's support life

Inside the HP 3000 division, the outlook for the system has a longer view than HP's support plans. How else could you explain patch MPEMXE1C, created for an MPE release that will fall off HP's support in about 13 months? It's not unusual for the engineers in the virtual 3000 division to build patches for MPE/iX even for a release about to fall off support. Customers, after all, use these releases long after HP stops supporting them.

But MPEMXE1C, which went into general release not long ago, caught our eye. This patch for the 6.5 release will make it possible for the HP 3000's DISCUTIL program to support disk drives as big as 300Gb. The biggest drive that HP will sell 6.5 users on a 3000 today is about half that size. It seems likely that an HP-labeled disk drive of 300Gb won't show up until the 6.5 release is long out of HP's support efforts. To put it another way, only the third-party MPE/iX support companies – and there are more of those this year than last – are likely to help a customer install MPEMXE1C. (Mike Hornsby of Beechglen, one of those support companies, reminds us that knowing which MPE patch to install is one place where the real value lies in third party support.)

So why would HP write something like this, for 6.5, when that release has about 13 months of supported life? Maybe because inside the 3000 division, the engineers mean it when they say they're about serving the customers on the system. Even after HP has moved away. We'd like to think that means any problems with MPEMXE1C will be fixed, too. It's just hard to imagine how you'd stress test something like a disk utility patch released for 300Gb drives. But it's nice to think HP, at least at the 3000 division, is still thinking that far in advance for the 3000 customers.

There's another possibility, one that HP hasn't decided upon yet. That 6.5 release might have more support life in it than 13 months. HP brought up this prospect in talks at Atlanta's HP World meeting this summer, a story we covered in our September edition. We haven't heard yet what the 3000 division has decided about extending 6.5's life. The reviews from the computer's ISVs were pretty negative, though. One vendor suggested that our September report might have chilled the sale of HP's last few weeks of N-Class and A-Class sales. Those purchases were supposed to have been sparked by the short support lifespan of the 9x7's 6.5 release. HP never talks about how many 3000's it has sold. But APPIC, a reseller in France, reported that it posted its best single week of sales ending Oct. 31, with eight confirmed systems selling that week.

Some wags considered the HP end of sales deadline as the best publicity HP had been able to manage for the system, considering the stories that surfaced at ABC News, the Wall Street Journal and Computerworld. The MPEMXE1C patch suggests a longer story for the server than some might have first imagined. The question to be answered: will those who haven't moved away yet continue to buy software and pay for support?

Customers move slowly to adopt migrate pace

It might have just been an off-the-cuff remark from the field, but Birket Foster's statement at the CAMUS conference call last week also caught our ear. Lots of companies, Foster said, haven't even convened committees to figure out what platform they will use to replace the HP 3000. The committee approach is often months, if not years, in advance of the actual move away from the platform.

Foster, whose company serves 3000 sites with data extraction tools and also works as an HP Platinum Migration partner, asked a question at the CAMUS meeting that intrigued us, too: What have you been doing with your two years since HP announced that it is leaving the 3000 community? Drop me a line at editor@3000newswire.com with your thoughts about your first two years of transition.


HP focuses on homestead issues with OpenMPE

We reported in our October issue that OpenMPE continues to be hopeful about the future for homesteading on 3000s, but the organization can't say a thing in public about what HP might do to help. OpenMPE operates in its talks with HP under a "verbal non-disclosure agreement," according to its board members, because HP needs that veil of reticence to examine plans for a post-2006 world.

The NDA attitude didn't sit well with customers who posted messages to the OpenMPE mailing list recently, especially when OpenMPE's leader Jon Backus announced a focus group about homesteading. HP will be listening to customers as well as the OpenMPE board, but lips will remain zipped about what is discussed. That's not really unusual for a focus group, a kind of customer meeting where a vendor usually gathers frank and sensitive comments.

Frank comments have been the rule on the OpenMPE mailing list. Backus announced there in October that "Mike Paivinen of HP has asked us to start up the Focus Group discussions again. The goal is to have a group of roughly 10-15 OpenMPE end users that would be willing to meeting for a small series (2 or 3) of conference calls. There would also be a private non-archived listserv used for scheduling of the conference calls and follow-up discussion. To better ensure success Mike and I have agreed that he will take a more active direct role in scheduling the conference calls, but OpenMPE will be very involved in the discussion."

Response on the OpenMPE list to this call for focus group members came from customers who are disillusioned about HP's intentions to help homesteaders. Those with any hope didn't weigh in with many comments. One of the customers who commented in our October article, Jim Haeseker, offered this view of how HP's decisions out of that focus group could impact his company's purchases:

"This was a business decision forced upon us by HP - a gamble that HP lost in a big way. Over the next few years, we will likely migrate (unwillingly) off the HP 3000, but it'll be on OUR schedule - not HP's. The destination platforms will depend on the applications chosen to meet our business needs. Thanks to HP's own decisions, they no longer have a lock on our computer hardware purchases."

Haeseker added that "Someone needs to remind HP that every current customer is a potential former customer. It all depends on how HP treats the customers they still have. Lately, that treatment hasn't been very good."


HP's financial condition: good to be overweight?

Tomorrow HP will announce its sales and profit figures for the fourth quarter of 2003. It looks like the company will post good profits for the period, but the numbers bear a closer scrutiny for any HP 3000 site that's looking to move away from the platform. Enterprise systems customers should expect to see some profit out of HP's business server segment, known as Business Critical Systems. What's more, the profit needs to be evident in HP's Unix systems business, which has bled red ink for several years by now.

HP will no doubt tell stock analysts that the Unix server business picked up in the period. IT spending overall is supposed to be on the increase, something that every business server manager would like to see. It's more important than ever to watch where HP is succeeding, and with what kind of customer.

A few weeks ago, investment bankers at JP Morgan rated the HP stock "overweight," one of those fuzzy analyst terms that means "a better value than it looks." The investors believe that HP's business "of selling large computers should be profitable" in the latest recent quarter. The stock was headed to a 52-week high on the IT upswing and such hopes about enterprise profits.

HP 3000 owners should look for evidence that the HP Unix server line is selling well with customers of their size. HP's presentations these days about success seem to focus on too many sites the size of FedEx or Amazon, and too few of the size of Virginia International Terminals. Those big customers can do a lot to pump up profits, but not enough to create critical mass for an operating environment like HP-UX. Critical mass kept IBM in the proprietary systems game, which is where HP-UX seems to be headed now. HP needs more success stories with companies the size of VIT to keep HP-UX a viable choice for the future.

The integration community has been having a hard time selling HP's enterprise plans while they read off the HP cue card. The HP talk of Adaptive Enterprise, said one reseller's technical sales rep, "is confusing the heck out of people. Customers don't understand it. And IBM has a better story, because they can keep you on the same platform." HP's AlphaServer enterprise customers will also face a migration, like the 3000 base. Itanium brings another transition to the HP-UX customers, with more chances for competitors like IBM to cash in.

Customers should care where HP makes its profits, if the enterprise customer plans to stick with HP. Making a large investment in a platform that doesn't contribute to HP's earnings might be costly later on. HP's management has demonstrated that it will eliminate unprofitable business lines. That's not the reason the 3000 was killed off, of course. But a lack of profit won't help HP-UX stay healthy, something that former HP 3000 owners should care about a great deal.

Amisys site Anthem picks up Wellpoint

While the healthcare business represents a chance for HP-UX to gain traction at the expense of MPE/iX, it looks as if one HP 3000 site will now get even more of a challenge to get onto that Unix platform. Anthem Inc., one of the nation's biggest managed-care companies and a spot where an HP 3000 network continues to serve today, has agreed to acquire WellPoint Health Networks Inc. for more than $12 billion in stock and cash.

The deal brings together a pair of the largest Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans with about 26 million members. A Wall Street Journal story on the acquisition said that "More importantly, it will transform the Blue Cross and Blue Shield name into a truly national brand for the first time. The Blue plans currently operate under license from a nonprofit association but are owned by different companies."

And those different companies have differing IT infrastructures. Anthem has only been using the HP 3000 since it acquired Trigon, a Virginia-based health plan, several years ago. Earlier this year we heard from an IT director at Anthem about trying to make one enterprise application serve the needs of both the payor business at Anthem as well as the managed care operations. Dale Kennedy said in the spring that could be a $40 million transition. Becoming a 26 million member health plan surely won't make that transition any easier.

The thing about relying on acquisitions to move out "legacy" platforms like the 3000 is that another, bigger acquisition could be just around the corner. And the next takeover could bump off hopes of replacing MPE/iX with something more industry-standard on an HP server.

Interex adds two new directors

The user group that still represents a segment of the HP 3000 community elected a long-time HP 3000 supporter to its board of directors this month, when Interex members voted in Chris Koppe, marketing director of Speedware. The user group has had dynamic board members from the 3000 vendor community in the past, a group that's included Jane Copeland of Holland House/API, George Hubman of WRQ, and most recently, Denys Beauchemin of Hi-Comp. Speedware's product offerings run beyond just HP 3000s these days, but the vendor is still strongly associated with the venerable business platform. Chuck Ciesinski, a long-time SIG chairman for the user group, reported that Interex also appointed Bob O'Brien of Microsoft to serve on the board.