HP 3000 owners who attended the most recent CAMUS manufacturing conference heard a refreshing message from an application provider which serves hundreds of companies. Sue Peyton of SSA Global Technologies (SSA-GT), owners of the MANMAN ERP application suite, said that customers “can stay until the nuts and bolts fall out of your systems.” The software company, which boasts of a $320 million yearly run rate that is growing to half a billion dollars during 2003, is making its name in the application space by encouraging its customers to stick with the ERP systems they’ve got — even if the code is several generations behind the latest release. Or in the case of those sites running HP 3000s, even if the hardware and operating system provider is pulling the platform off its price list in less than six months.

SSA’s CEO Mike Greenough said in a keynote speech to the Computer Aided Manufacturing User Society that “I do believe that HP are the bad guys here, and not us” while explaining what customers could do about being abandoned by their hardware provider. The comments were a strong counterpoint to the message that HP’s been sending to 3000 sites, a mantra about how 19 of the top 20 application providers for the 3000 have already committed to moving their apps to another HP platform. Customers now know that the 20th app provider is digging in its heels in a move it believes will benefit the small to midsize clients who don’t have the millions of dollars, pounds or marks it could well take to move off an ERP system. SSA-GT is also offering an option that gives its MANMAN sites free software and database conversion if they take up with another of the SSA ERP products, but customers at the conference said even waiving those software fees leaves a hefty bill on their desks to move away from the 3000.

Greenough’s comments seemed to underscore his company motto that “ERP systems are like brain surgery — never to be repeated unless the patient is dying. Once you’ve got a system, there’s no reason that system shouldn’t be extended.” Add-on software, some of it tied to the Business Intelligence offerings from Cognos, will provide SSA with the new software to sell to its MANMAN sites. Some of those customers are using software that goes back more than four major releases from the current 12.0 versions of MANMAN apps, and Peyton said that SSA-GT even wants to support these older versions still running on vintage HP 3000s. SSA-GT also wants to find a group of MANMAN customers who are not on OnGoing Support (OGS) from the provider, a group of customers that it estimated as between 1,300 and 2,500 in number. SSA-GT has been coy about how many sites are using MANMAN on the 3000 today, but third-party support providers estimate it’s about 400. The number rivals any other packaged application’s installed base on the 3000, even without those off-OGS sites.

SSA-GT didn’t turn its head completely away from the prospect of moving MANMAN to HP-UX, but said it needs to find 150 customers who will commit to such a lateral move by December 31. Customers at the conference couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for this migration, a mission which Peyton described as “extremely expensive for us and extremely expensive for you.” The hesitance that emerged from the CAMUS attendees — about 200 from both HP 3000 and OpenVMS platforms were at the Dallas show — seemed to center around the fact that there’s no guarantee of enhancements to a MANMAN that would be ported to HP-UX. SSA-GT believes it can get the application onto HP’s Unix, but it wants to accomplish that much before assuring its customers they can move up to a Version 13.0 — a release that was promised to the OpenVMS sites at the show.