September 2004

OpenMPE aims at crucial quarter

Chairman says organization needs purchase orders now

OpenMPE board members opened up a showdown quarter at the organization’s HP World meeting, telling several dozen attendees in Chicago the group needs to raise $1.55 million in purchase orders by Nov. 30 to be ready to work in 2005.

The POs, or letters of intent, would commit a company to a payment of $5,000-$37,500 for one year of engineering services to maintain and enhance MPE/iX — but only if HP agrees in 2005 to turn over the source code for the 3000 operating system to the organization. OpenMPE board chairman Birket Foster, who led the meeting, said commitments for just 100 HP 3000s can put OpenMPE to work on whatever HP might permit the group to do in 2005.

“We need 100 POs to make our budget,” Foster said. “We picked that number because only 123 people voted in the last OpenMPE board election.” Pricing for the services is based on machine size. OpenMPE planned to place the price list and its proposed budget on its openmpe.org Web site, although the data hadn’t made it online by the beginning of September. Timing of the campaign is crucial, Foster added, because 3000 sites are planning 2005 budgets this fall.

Foster calculated the needs of OpenMPE’s first year using an activity-based costing formula, along with several “scientific, wild-assed guesses.” The totals shown at the meeting used figures heavy on engineering and testing costs and light on administration, sales and marketing for the 2005 operations. The group plans to make the 3000 community’s independent support vendors and application suppliers the primary resource for sales of OpenMPE services. OpenMPE has dedicated less than 2 percent of its budget to marketing, relying on postcards, e-mails and direct mail.

3000 NewsWire publisher Abby Lentz donated three months of ads to the organization at the meeting. Getting the word out on the organization is budgeted at $5,000 per quarter, Foster said, “at least some money in it, so we could keep our visibility above zero.”

Unofficial reports after the meeting suggested that the board wasn’t in total agreement on the deadline for the OpenMPE effort. But the group was moving toward proving it can attract operating revenues. OpenMPE is organized as an LLC with one share of stock, but Foster said “We haven’t looked at any of the legal organization issues, because we haven’t proved that it can be sustainable or not. One or two big sites, coming forward to slap money on the table for a cheap MPE/iX insurance policy, could change everything.”

Mid-2005 is the earliest possible date for OpenMPE to begin work on MPE/iX, according to HP’s last advisory in April, 2004. “You’d have to have money in the bank to fund this as early as June, 2005,” Foster said.

OpenMPE doesn’t intend to have any employees, according to the board’s plans, but will engage in contracts for everything from development and maintenance engineering to administration of member licenses and fees. The organization has no capital costs budgeted for equipment in its first year, “and most of the costs are in software engineering,” Foster said, “managing the source code and the testing.”

Projects in the first year of OpenMPE work — once HP permits the group access to the MPE/iX source — would cover adding new peripherals, making changes to accommodate new networking such as IPV6, and the management of source code changes as dictated by patches for bug fixes and enhancements. OpenMPE would do most of the work via patches, to decrease the impact to HP for customers who don’t sign up for OpenMPE services.

MPE’s Java services were among the specific subsystems that need to be updated, Foster said. “It’s already fallen behind, and it needs to be looked at pretty soon.”

Monies paid to OpenMPE would be eligible for a 95 percent refund if HP refuses to release the MPE/iX source code during 2005. But since many 3000 sites plan their 2005 budgets between now and year’s end, OpenMPE volunteers felt a fall campaign was essential. “By this time next year, either a lot more people will have contributed, or we won’t have an organization,” Foster said.

Board members at the meeting felt like they were shooting for a low number of system commitments by Nov. 30, a first step to prove the community’s interest.

“The issue is proving to everybody that this can be done,” said board member Donna Garverick. Pivital Solutions’ Steven Suraci, another board member, agreed. “If we can’t get commitments for 100 machines, then we’re kidding ourselves.”