HP World changes post-merger

Smaller sessions promote migration, while homesteaders huddle at SIG meetings

The first meeting between top HP executives and HP 3000 customers since the vendor’s exit announcement didn’t spur the sparks anticipated by some in the 3000 community. HP forestalled the clashes at a much smaller conference than recent years, by bringing some hope for homesteaders to Los Angeles at the same time it arranged hours of migration briefings.

The conference attendance was noticeably off from the Chicago venue of last year. Estimates from vendors on the show floor and those in the well-packed sessions put the total attendee count below 5,000. The expo floor showed less than 200 booths, where traffic was often light. Show organizers distributed free meal tickets to exhibitors on the last day since users had left. Vendors said lower numbers of attendees were offset by the quality of their leads.

The strongest session crowds relevant to HP 3000 customers at the show came in two widely divergent venues: a full-day briefing by HP’s Alvina Nishimoto and George Stachnik on migration strategy; and the two-hour session on the homesteading advances offered by HP to OpenMPE advocates. Nearly all sessions we attended had 50 or fewer in the room.

Across three-plus days and miles of steps between meeting rooms and the show floor, a pattern of cautious observation emerged from attendees whose responsibilities include HP 3000s. Many were on hand to decide which way they would transition, and when. Here’s a few pages out of a reporter’s notebook on news and events that seemed representative at HP World 2002:

A Long Hello, But a Good Buy? HP CEO Carly Fiorina smashed conference goers’ schedules early on by talking almost a half-hour beyond her allotted time. Reciting a prepared speech from the podium rather than working without notes as she did in 1999,

HP CEO Carly Fiorina's keynote overshot its time limit by 25 minutes

Fiorina told the crowd that HP “had never stranded a customer on legacy technology,” the only reference that even came close to a mention of the HP 3000 customers’ transition.

Fiorina’s address, aimed at a very large size of customer out of keeping with typical HP World attendees, pushed the message of being the biggest supplier that drove the company’s decision to merge with Compaq. Of its Services offerings, she said “HP is one of the few companies that can span as deep and as wide as your systems,” she said. “Make no mistake about it: we will lead.”

The CEO’s message included a potshot at IBM, saying its competitor’s vertically integrated strategy means “you can’t have it your way, but you can have it IBM’s way.” The message was a curious flip of the position many HP 3000 shops face — forced to migrate away from their systems which HP is discontinuing, but are working nonetheless.

Fiorina also criticized IT shops “built to be stable, not to react quickly.” She quoted from a survey that says the business environment is changing seven times faster than underlying IT applications — asserting that HP’s customers aren’t re-inventing and investing rapidly enough for the vendor’s taste.

Fiorina asked if it wasn’t “better to work with one vendor you trust” instead of a diverse group of suppliers. Integrating HP with Compaq is best accomplished while “spending in IT is slow,” she added. Response to her address was torpid as well; the only break for applause came when she mentioned HP was glad to work with Interex at a show that’s the longest continuous running IT conference in North America. “28 years of partnership with HP.”

HP Services chief Ann Livermore said "2006 means 2006."

“We will be the company that reinvents the IT value proposition,” Fiorina said in closing. IT manager John Burke said afterward he was attending the speech “to see if Carly would break her arm patting herself on the back.”

When Fiorina wrapped up her speech the conference’s show floor was minutes from opening, and attendees spilled from the room a few minutes after the start of Ann Livermore’s address. The head of HP’s Services group did note that the company’s support of the 3000 wouldn’t be drawn back any further, saying “2006 means 2006.”

2006 Not Long Enough: Just an hour after Livermore assured the 3000 crowd that HP’s support deadline would stand firm, its customers were saying more time is required to transition. Mark Klein, a 27-year veteran of development at Orbit Software, inside HP, and on contract for HP 3000 owners, said at the SIG-IMAGE meeting that migration projects run longer than expected.

“I’ve seen far too many of these projects where people attempt to migrate off the 3000 and fail miserably,” he said. “I’ve got a little counsel for HP. When this starts to happen in the next 18 months, I hope you’ll realize that 2006 is really going to be too short of a window.”

Adager’s Alfredo Rego said he’d identified customers using home-grown applications developed at a cost of millions of dollars. He’d invited HP to visit these customers to see the scope of their challenges, but HP declined in the months following the November announcement.

“They would be able to provide many of the specific answers to the questions that HP has” about how to structure homesteading and migration solutions. “I would bet anything it would have been a lot cheaper for HP to pay for the trips of one or two of its people to visit those customers. Lots of info could have been learned very quickly and early, and you might not be doing so many surveys now.”

Bad Timing: “If you’re caught in the wrong cycle from the announcement of 11-14,” said James Staton, a senior VP of technology and service at Executive Relocation, “you basically lost all of 2002, because your budget was already gone. If you buy in 2003, you don’t really want your migration to be over in 2006. We had a year-and-a-half cut off the five years [HP promised] from the announcement.”

Eloquence Speaks On Its Own: In a modest comment at the start of his talk about Eloquence, Marxmeier AG’s Michael Marxmeier announced that his company had signed a memorandum of understanding to take back from HP the intellectual property rights for Eloquence, the database for Unix, Linux and NT that HP database experts were anointing as the substitute for IMAGE.

“This means we will be allowed to operate more independently,” Marxmeier said, “to make sure Eloquence is around 10 years from now. It’s not a key product for HP.” Marxmeier said his company has been able to act quickly under HP’s ownership of the software. “There’s not much changing. I don’t have to call the HP project manager and ask if it’s okay if I do something [with the product]. The good thing was that my project manager always said, ‘Just do it.’ “

The software is being sold through MB Foster in North America, and other Platinum Partners are considering acting as distribution channels. Marxmeier said that 95 percent of his customers already have support contracts through a software vendor other than HP. These vendors sometimes have a direct support contract with Marxmeier’s labs. Two-thirds of the database’s installed customers are located outside of North America.

Marxmeier was discussing the nuances of TurboIMAGE emulation with HP’s Tien-You Chen of the IMAGE labs at the conference. He noted that a European ISV, eBootis, has completed a port from IMAGE to Eloquence, moving an manufacturing application to HP-UX in three months that used COBOL and VPlus. While the company offers the product for its 250 installed sites, it’s also selling upgrades to its customers for HP 3000 models.

HP Honors 3000 Awardees: Denys Beauchemin and Ken Sletten won this year’s honors from HP for the e3000 Contributor award, the first time two members of the 3000 community have won the award together. Both of the winners serve on the SIG-IMAGE/SQL Executive Committee; Sletten has chaired the SIG for many years and

Denys Beauchemin (l) and Ken Sletten won HP's e3000 Contributor awards at HP World

serves on the OpenMPE board of directors, while Beauchemin serves as “the most active MPE member” on the Interex board, according to HP’s Dave Wilde.

HP’s 3000 business manager gave the awards at the close of his keynote speech, saying that Sletten and Beauchemin are “strong advocates of MPE and IMAGE, both volunteering countless hours of personal time to make the e3000 better for all of us. They exhibit persistence and tenacity that reveal their deep passion for the HP 3000 and its software. They’ve been involved in IMAGE advocacy from the beginning, including getting the IMAGE/SQL interface implemented. They’re two people for whom I and countless others have tremendous respect and admiration.”

Sletten said HP’s honors to those advocating continued use of the platform prove “they’re not necessarily honoring just yes-men.”

IBM Woos Around Interex: Making good on its pledge to court HP 3000 customers who have been advised to migrate, IBM’s iSeries group and more than a dozen partners threw a party and gave demonstrations to well over 100 software partners and customers. The event was held in a suite of three rooms at the LA Convention Center, just five minutes’ walk from the HP World area of the facility.

MPE vendors and users crowded into IBM's event to check out the iSeries offers

IBM offered food and an open bar to all attendees, and gave away a laptop computer in a drawing won by a staffer from Quest Software. IBM’s officials reported that the user group’s staff attempted to block the vendor from renting the suites at the conference hall, but the Interex request was denied by the City of Los Angeles, which operates the convention center. HP’s Customer Appreciation Event was scheduled directly against the IBM foray, down at the swank Westin Bonaventure hotel.

“You can see that IBM is on the march,” said Walter Camp of Cothern Computer Systems, an iSeries partner offering Application Migration Methodology at the HP World event. “I was surprised to see it was mostly software vendors there, and thought it was a pretty good turnout.”

Other vendors in the room included integrators Avnet, Digiterra and Infinium; PIR Group, offering a COBOL native to the iSeries much like the 3000’s COBOL II; migration service providers Transoft and Sector 7; Ecometry competitor CommercialWare; ERP provider CMS; Essex Technology in partnership with 3000 channel partner Advanced Network Systems; Texum Technology, offering Linux solutions on the iSeries hardware; and Vormittag Associates, showing distribution and manufacturing software.

“We were very excited at the outcome of the show,” added PIR Group’s sales manager Christian Schneider, “and not just the IBM piece of the show. There’s going to be a lot more awareness of the iSeries as a result. We also presented at the SIG-COBOL group, and I think that opened up a lot of eyes.”

HP’s Inside Information: At the OpenMPE meeting, HP’s Mike Paivinen said that HP’s internal documentation of the system is among “things that we have that would make it easier to provide support after we’re out of the support business,” enabling support suppliers outside HP to be able to read MPE source, for example. HP said it intends to investigate the release of this internal documentation. When quizzed about how long it might take to investigate this move, Paivinen said “I don’t even know when it is likely to start,” let alone finish.

SIG-Migrate Stakes Its Claims: The first meeting of SIG-Migrate took place over two hours of the first full day of the conference, and the meeting drew around 60 attendees at its peak. Representatives from three of HP’s validated 3GL solution alternatives presented at the meeting, as customers heard from Ordina Denkart, Transoft and Neartek. About 700-800 end user 3000 customers are running with applications migrated using Neartek’s Windows 2000-based tools in Europe, according to the company’s Ernesto Soria.

Transoft’s Mike Dixon offered the clearest path to non-HP hardware as a migration option, saying that “We’re very independent to databases and to hardware. Our migration solution lets you decide what your environment is going to be like for the next 10 years, not just getting off the machine.”

Nicolas Fortin of Speedware, who chaired the meeting, said he’s looking into whether Interex will permit SIG-Migrate’s agenda to include discussion of non-HP platforms as target environments.

Right at the close of the meeting, customers got a warning about the structure of migration project contracts. John Stenbeck, president of Pareto Principals (www.paretoprincipals.com) warned that elements in these contracts can seriously change the bottom line of a migration’s cost. Some HP 3000 customers will be entering into their first such migration agreements without experience in negotiating for costs of changes, for example.

Boy Scout Migration Help: Adager’s Rego commended HP for its efforts in marshalling extensive resources on migration away from the HP 3000, calling HP’s panelists at the e3000 Roundtable boy scouts in their resolve to help. He said the HP efforts remind him of a story he heard about four scouts who were needed to help a lady across the street. “Why did they need four scouts?” Rego asked. “Well, it’s because it seems the lady didn’t want to cross the street.”