CSY roundtable fields queries on new 3000 capability, code

Top HP managers eye freeware futures, support issues at HP World

A panel of the HP 3000 brain trust fielded two hours of questions at the 3000 Management Roundtable during HP World ’99, outlining its position on support for freeware utilities Perl and sendmail, sprucing up marketing for the system, and improving support and documentation options.

Freeware to supported tools: Lab section manager Pam Bennett said HP is “working with support on deciding which tools” should remain freeware and which will become bundled and supported. Sendmail/iX is being considered for support and inclusion on the MPE FOS tape. While HP is already bundling Syslog/iX, Bennett said HP doesn’t have an API for it.

Perl support: Lab section manager Becky McBride said HP’s plans for Perl are in line with the plans for Sendmail/iX. Perl/iX is available on the HP CSY Jazz Web server, and HP will be considering if it will include Perl as a supported part of the 3000 operating system. Linking Perl tightly to IMAGE and KSAM is unlikely, she added, because of the 3000’s Transaction Manager and how it’s linked into the operating system.

Curbing third-party upgrade costs: Vicky Symonds, Product Marketing manager, said HP has talked with both Speedware and Cognos to restructure and reprice products to make upgrades more cost-effective.

Store to disk: These capabilities on the 3000, currently only available by using TurboStore 7x24, look like they’re headed into the full customer base. R&D Section Manager Dave Wilde said HP would be giving a “very serious look” at making the capability available to all HP 3000 customers “in the very short term.”

Mirroring LDEV 1: The perennial question about extending disk mirroring to the system volume set got a new answer, as Wilde said HP would be looking at a software solution other than its “use AutoRAID” answer of previous years. “We’ll be looking at some lower-cost hardware solutions to this problem, too,” Wilde said, “something easier and lower cost than covering LDEV 1 with a disk array.”

Posix smoothing: These issues got addressed by Bennett, who said HP would be focusing on a broader scale of porting enablers. “As part of our middleware efforts, we’re trying to provide those porting enablers as we port middleware,” she said, “making sure we have solutions that can be used by the broader community in porting other applications and solutions to the 3000.” Bennett announced that CSY engineer Jeff Vance is the division’s porting enabler architect.

E-services: They apply to the HP 3000, according to CSY Marketing Manager Christine Martino. She fielded a question that asked how e-services could apply to the 3000 when there was no way to order 3000 products on the Internet. Martino pointed to the Open Skies initiative and the Telenomics apps-on-tap program as evidence of 3000 e-services involvement. “We were the first server product to be out in the e-services ad campaign,” she said, “not Unix or NT.”

Ordering 3000s over the Web: This is something Martino admitted she “hadn’t put a lot or resources into looking at. The Web is getting there, but hasn’t been ready to order complex server systems, but we’re looking at it.” Martino also mentioned 3kworld.com would have orderability of 3000 products in the future, as well as from the HP Web site. “Frankly, I don’t think the community has been ready to order that kind of system from the Web yet,” she said. HP will also be cleaning up the 3000 product line, simplifying choices, in preparation for orders over the Web.

Development-support single contact: One customer asked if HP would ever supply a single point of contact for support concerns and product-development issues regarding the 3000. New general manager Winston Prather said that support contacts should function as a single point of contact, and “if that’s an issue, you need to keep telling us that it is, so we can fix it. Internally, we have an excellent relationship with the support organization.”

Y2K-compliant release: HP identified the most Y2K-compliant MPE/iX release as PowerPatch 7 of 5.5, and 6.0. PowerPatch 4 and 6 are also Y2K compliant. The compliance is achieved with some patches on top of PowerPatch 7. A patch matrix is available on the Web at jazz.external ..hp.com/year2000/patches.html.

Patching instructions: HP said it’s not really trying to make patching instructions harder than ever. Kristy Ward of HP’s Support organization admitted the manual just doesn’t work, and they will be rewriting it.

Extending support for older hardware: Support for the Series 937 through 987 HP 3000s, HP-IB devices, round tapes and disk drives, Scope XL and DTC 48 will end five years after the product has been taken off the corporate price list. HP can continue support of a product beyond that if its parts inventory hasn’t been exhausted at the end of the five-year period. The Support organization will be doing “a significant project” within the next year to help customers learn when support is ending for such products. A local support agreement can sometimes be worked out to extend the support life for HP 3000 products.

Inbound Telnet Server: Problems with the Inbound Telnet Server error messages being cryptic will be resolved and documented. In a related topic, HP said the complete updated COBOL and MPE intrinsics manuals will be available for the MPE/iX 6.5 release. More than 20 manuals will be completely updated, including the VPlus manual. All will be available on the HP Web site as well as on the HP Instant Information CD ROM.

X-Windows: HP has no plans to create an X-Windows server product for MPE/iX. The X-Windows client product that’s been available is a low-volume product, according to HP’s Bennett.

Marketing to non-HP sites: HP’s marketing efforts on behalf of the 3000 came in for a significant part of the roundtable’s discussion. When would HP recommend a 3000 over a 9000? Marketing manager Martino said that 1999 “has been a banner year for press coverage for us,” but reiterated that HP “isn’t marketing the 3000 as a multipurpose computer anymore. The place we see customers coming from in the future will be a solution sale model.”

HP is shifting more marketing dollars toward ISVs such as Smith-Gardner, she said, pushing a solution message instead of just a 3000 message. “We realistically can’t and shouldn’t compete on just a platform level anymore. We have so many best in class applications that we don’t need to.”

Harry Sterling, outgoing CSY general manager, noted that HP paid for advertising in the form of a segment on the World Business Review program on CNBC. Sterling said the segment would air on all TWA and United Airline flights in the month of September. “That was advertising we paid for to get the 3000 message to CEOs,” Sterling said. “Don’t expect a big HP 3000 platform ad, because we want to leverage HP’s overall e-services campaign.”

Loretta Li-Sevilla, Marketing Solutions/Communications manager, said HP 3000 e-services ads have been running in InformationWeek and ComputerWorld. “We’re trying to focus our advertising in the vertical markets,” she said. “We’re expanding that this year.”

When Solution-Soft’s Larry Boyd asked about the disconnect between the HP sales force and the 3000 efforts, Martino replied with news that she named a US sales manager in May for HP’s 3000 sales efforts. Hank Wendrowski has been in the HP sales organization for 20 years, and “he is putting together an organization that will help people in the HP direct sales force know what’s going on with the HP 3000.”

European efforts are coordinated through three regional marketing managers, “who are doing an excellent job, so I haven’t seen the need to revamp the structure there.”

Enhancing Perfview: Lab section manager Wilde said scripts have been published to take data from the Scope collector and generate the kind of reports needed in a Perfview environment. Admitting the process was working poorly and was poorly documented, Wilde said HP decided taking Measureware code to the 3000 was too complex. HP will be testing and better documenting the existing scripts over the next four months, so Scope data can work with Perfview.

640D support life cycle: When asked what a customer might replace the HP 640D printer with now that HP is ending its manufacture, Symonds replied “there are a lot of third-party high-speed system printers out there on the market today.”

SCSI error checking: Adager’s Ken Paul asked how HP was going to pay for support time spent on problems that SCSI devices cause, since they don’t report errors as well as HP-IB devices. The problems result in Adager needing to repair customer databases corrupted by the faulty hardware. Paul said he expects these incidents to escalate as HP-IB won’t be supported in the 6.5 MPE/iX release. A check of error logs often shows no hardware errors, which leads HP support techs to say the SCSI devices aren’t causing the corruption. CSY GM Winston Prather said “it’s not our intent to do that. Keep working with us to let us know when our support channel isn’t able to do the troubleshooting.”

Relations between 3kworld.com and Interex: Martino said that for 3kworld.com to be successful “and a real source of community for the 3000, I think everything has to be tied into it: Interex, 3000-L, everything we’re doing at HP and our partners. They’ve gotten support from all these organizations. Everything has to be tied in there, or it really doesn’t represent the whole community.”

Sterling added that “what we’re actually doing there is building a 3000 portal… potentially, a way to make purchases in the future of 3000 products. This is the first phase.”

General Manager Prather said, “It’s important that we all contribute to it. We think it’s a really good idea.” He said that chats with HP engineers at the site would be happening in the future, and Martino noted that CSY was a founding member of the online community.

Compiler plans: Jeanette Nutsford asked how HP was planning to move its languages from PA-RISC to IA-64, and Becky McBride said Randy Roten was pulling together a compiler road map. HP “is seeking input,” Roten said. “We don’t have a road map. It’s coming along and we’re making good progress today.”

Bringing SupportLine up to date: When told that SupportLine’s Electronic Support Center has obsolete HP 3000 information, Ward of HP’s Support organization explained that HP’s search engine looks for patch Read Me files by document ID. HP has failed to isolate the cause of failed searches for these files, she said. Patch information can also be superseded and deleted, also causing searches for patch data to fail; divisions make the decision to delete superseded patch information. Ward said HP was studying how to extend the Yahoo-like search capabilities of the ESC to patch documents.

Prather said HP has uncovered “a hole in the process where patches are created that don’t make it to the [SupportLine database], and we’re fixing that.” When a patch is marked bad, sometimes information about the patch can disappear as well; this problem is also being corrected. Prather explained, as HP has at past roundtables, that all SR text isn’t viewable in the ESC because confidential customer information is contained in it.

MIB support: Birket Foster of MB Foster Associates asked if HP could publish the Management Information Base for the HP 3000 so channel partners could more easily integrate with the system for management tools. Wilde said HP would like to do this, but the 3000 division encourages interested channel partners to talk with HP directly. “If more people need it, then we should architect the interface and publish it, and then make sure we put it under change control,” he said. Foster replied that if the MIB data were so published, “[MPE] third-party software could become visible to SNMP- (Simple Network Management Protocol) based tools like OpenView, TME-10 and CA-Unicenter.”