Number 93 (Update of Volume 9, Issue 2)

Interex survey shows slow migrations

After less than a month of e-mail polling, Interex has posted results from its latest survey of HP 3000 sites and customers’ plans for transition. The user group pushed an e-mail message to the 900-plus subscribers to the 3000-L mailing list, the several hundred names (some duplicated) on the OpenMPE mailing list, and Interex members. 319 replies arrived.

Interex reports that 21 percent of these respondents have no plans to migrate at all, and many of the remainder of the customers report they won’t be off the platform before HP’s 2006 end of support deadline. It sounds like a bounty for third party software companies, as well as the migration services suppliers.

You can look over the results yourself at www.interex.org/advocacy/survey/e3000needs_results.html. This survey is going to be repeated in time for next summer's HP World conference in August. We just don't know how many HP 3000 customers will be on hand there to hear about the 2004 poll.


HP to mount a new migration Webcast

Perhaps to show its customers that not all roads lead to an HP operating environment which the vendor controls, the HP 3000 marketing team led by George Stachnik is putting up another Webcast in January. The newest program will extol the virtues of moving to the Microsoft .NET environment from the HP 3000. Over the summertime we spoke with Steve Smith, a longtime developer of 3000 applications who’s moving his programs to the Microsoft platform. Smith was frank about the Microsoft pitfalls and how to work around them. You can read his interview online in our free Web site at www.3000newswire.com/SmithQA-03Jun.html.

Compare for yourself how much HP is willing to report on the issues with Microsoft. Every environment has issues as well as advantages. One advantage to using Microsoft as an applications platform can be cost savings over HP’s support fees. But then, we expect cost might not be the thing driving customers toward other platforms. That would be HP, using its Webcasts. The HP Webcast is on January 14, and you can register for it at www.hp.com/go/e3000reg.

Cognos posts rising quarter, forecasts strong 2004

Just after we reported on migration options away from Cognos’ PowerHouse, the company weighed in with its third quarter 2004 financial results. The numbers show a company approaching the kind of profitability it showed during its HP 3000 4GL tools heyday of the 1980s.

Revenue for the quarter was $172.2 million, an increase of 25 percent over the same period last year. Net income in the quarter was $24.2 million, an increase of 22 percent over the third quarter of last year.

Revenue for the first nine months of this year was $481 million, an increase of 24 percent. Profits for the nine-month period were $54.8 million.

Cognos stock is rising on the strength of its ReportNet product, a solution the company reported was sold into places like DaimlerChrysler, Tyson Foods and the State of Ohio. Meanwhile, the 8.40 release of PowerHouse hasn’t been announced yet. Cognos’ Bob Berry, director of operations, said the software was scheduled to ship in the fourth quarter of this calendar year.

Cognos ties off its fiscal year at the end of February, and the company expects to generate revenues of $675 million for fiscal 2004. Profits could run as high as $85 million for the period. The company reports that it closed 10 contracts of more than $1 million each, a record for Cognos, during its quarter ending Nov. 30.


FTP versus DSCOPY:
you’d be surprised who’s faster

File Transfer Protocol is the standard for exchanging data between servers these days. Sure enough, the HP 3000 has FTP server software included with the operating system. But don’t expect the 3000’s FTP to move data to another 3000 as fast as a 10-year-old alternative, DSCOPY.

Donna Garverick, a member of the OpenMPE board and a systems manager at Long’s Drug, reports that DSCOPY is much faster than FTP for moving data between 3000s:

“FTP's from MPE-to-MPE will perform slower than a DSCOPY. DSCOPY (even though it's showing its age) was optimized for MPE, does block transfers vs. FTP's character transfers.

“I was joyfully beating programmers the other day, trying to get them to use FTP instead of DSCOPY. They proved that DSCOPY left FTP in its dust. I was really surprised.”

HP reorganizes for new fiscal year

HP decided to put its enterprise business back in the hands of an executive from the old HP, when it handed the Business Critical Systems unit back to Ann Livermore. Peter Blackmore, a Compaq executive VP who got the unit including the HP 3000 and HP 9000 just after the 2002 merger, has been placed in a new customer-oriented unit HP formed. CEO Carly Fiorina said HP looked at how it was managing its enterprise servers (ESG) and its support business (HPS), then decided to change the leadership.

“We are making these adjustments to our organization in response to recommendations of the recent ESG-HPS task force, which for the past six months has been helping us streamline our go-to-market operation."

Livermore is now in charge of a new Technology Solutions Group, which includes the remains of the HP 3000 operations as well as the HP-UX and HP Windows 2000 group.

HP didn’t make any changes to the group that supplies more than half of the company’s profits, Imaging and Printing. Executive VP Vyomesh Joshi will continue to oversee the company’s consumer business, which includes a camera line as well the ultra-profitable consumables business of toner and inks.

Interex names new chairman

Just as the deadline was approaching for the Online Extra, we heard reports that Interex’s board got a new chairman with old ties to the 3000 community. Denys Beauchemin is the new chair of the Interex board, elected to the top spot after winning a second term on the board in the fall elections.

Minisoft discounts offer for wireless 3000 link

Even a computer no longer manufactured continues to sport new features. Wireless access to an HP 3000 has been available for some time, but never at the price announced by Minisoft this month. In an era when discounts matter most to companies that are working to scrape aside transition budgets, the company is offering Minisoft Pocket92, which supports HP700/92 and VT terminal emulation for Windows CE 3.0 hand held devices, at $59 a copy. The price is only good until December 31, 2003. The software supports handhelds from Intermec, HP’s Jornada, Dell, Compaq iPAQ, and the Tablet PC. See more details on the solution to keep system administrators in touch with 3000s at the company’s Web site, www.minisoft.com/pages/connectivity/minisoft92/pages/windowsCE.htm

inetd now logs fork success

HP continues to work out the bugs on the HP 3000’s operating system, at least as many as it can while the experts can make time for 3000 duties. Much of the 3000 expertise is spread across multiple operating environments in the modern HP, so seeing a bug fix is a welcome development. James Hofmeister of the Global Solutions Engineering group (WTEC) reports that the inetd daemon is now able to report a success or failure of a fork on MPE/iX 7.0 and 7.5. A couple of beta patches supply the feature Hofmeister said:

“We have 7.x patches for an enhancement to inetd (SR 8606-325249) which will log the success or failure of fork and if a failure then return the hpe_status code to inetd's $stdlist.

“The most common/frequent cause for a fork to fail in inetd is a resource error, typically "out of disk space" or "out of contiguous disk space".

If you think you are seeing a problem with INETD forking (FTPSRVR as an example), then you can request a INT patch for 7.0 or 7.5 from the HP-RC as per SR 8606-325249: INTHD63 for C.70.00 (beta test), and INTHD64 for C.75.00 (also beta test).