Transition tour outlines migrate option

12-city road show consolidates first year’s
planning advice for several hundred 3000 sites

First in a series

It’s just beyond 8 AM on a historic day for HP 3000 owners, and HP is working to write the final chapter in its story of the HP 3000. In Houston on November 14, something less than two dozen customer sites have sent their IT staff to hear the news about the platform’s transition — one year to the day after HP announced its end of sales and support.

In a single meeting room of a mid-range Hilton outlet planted hard by Houston’s eight-lane Southwest Freeway, Migration Center Manager Alvina Nishimoto and four speakers from HP’s Platinum Migration partners are checking off names and passing out paper adhesive name tags for the day. Inside the room more than 50 places are set with brochures and data sheets from the partners, a CD containing white papers, Webcasts and slide sets, as well as a complimentary pocket-sized socket and screwdriver set. The toolsets are stamped with the e3000 logo, a brand that HP means to erase with its advice offered in the room.

During the first hour of the tour’s only stop in Texas, just under 50 people sit in the room. The number includes HP’s complement of six speakers for the day, and nearly a score of consultants and vendors. Some of this score of attendees have followed the tour from stop to stop, hoping that talks with 3000 customers gathered in a room will result in some service engagements. A few of the Houston attendees have recently been laid off from IT jobs, and are looking for work. Searching, it appears, is everybody’s goal today, the customers looking for answers, the consultants and HP’s Platinum speakers looking for business.

And even HP is looking, during its first hour of presentations. HP asks attendees to raise their hands if they’ve received the coupon the vendor has mailed, paper with a special code good for more than $2,000 in Unix training. Only two hands go up, and HP is clearly expecting more. “We’ve got to take a look at our database on this,” said the HP host to Nishimoto, clearly disappointed in his connection with the customers.

Nishimoto, who manages the technical details of the Migration Center under the auspices of HP’s marketing center, plunges on through almost an hour of briefing about HP’s offerings, assembled over the last year. The marketing group arranges meetings like this one, she explains, while she’s in charge of finding solutions for customers trying to leave behind 20 to 30 years of MPE and IMAGE functionality.

For the moment, the easiest way to continue that functionality is to ensure the customers have the latest hardware. Only six slides into the presentation Nishimoto is reminding the tour attendees about HP’s latest N-Class and A-Class servers, after reminding them that HP recommends a transition away from the platform. “As long as you’re on an A- or N-Class, you have a lot of room to grow,” she says.

It’s not an entirely incongruous offer. The newest hardware systems can be converted at no charge to more modern models of HP-UX computers; older 9x9 and 9x8 3000s can only become slower HP Unix systems. Nishimoto even reminds customers that converting an A-Class system to Unix unleashes the full power of the PA-8700 CPU inside. An A-Class unit that is held back to 200MHz under MPE runs its clock at 650MHz as a Unix system.

Not all of the offers revolve around HP’s Unix. Nishimoto tells customers HP is still working on enhancements to MPE in the operating system’s final year of HP development, and customers can still vote on which enhancements they want HP to deliver.

But alternative platforms quickly become the focus of Nishimoto’s talk. She summarizes the Investment Protection Program announced at this year’s HP World, a downward-sliding scale of dollar credits for new purchases of the latest HP 3000s or upgrades of A-Class and N-Class systems to the latest 8700-based CPUs. It’s the only program that lets customers apply dollar credits toward Itanium-based purchases in the future. New systems purchased earn 50 percent credit toward any HP Unix system purchased in 2003, 40 percent credit during 2004, and 30 percent credit during 2005 and 2006. Customers have to register with HP within three months of their HP 3000 purchase that they intend to use the program, “to satisfy the accountants.”

“People want additional flexibility on the 9000 they are going to convert to,” she says. “We will likely come out with another revision of the PA-RISC chip set, and we won’t have a 3000 that uses that revision.” Customers can convert their existing 3000s and receive the dollar credits toward a newer HP 9000 using the PA-8800 chips. The program runs through the current HP fiscal year.

The loaner program gets airtime as well, a deal that gives a customer six months’ free use of an HP-UX or Proliant NT system during “a rigid migration program with a timeline.” At the end of the six-month period a customer can keep their loaned machine and purchase it at a discount ranging from 20 to 40 percent, or convert their HP 3000 to an HP 9000.

The loaned systems can be upgraded once the customer decides to buy out the system, in case a 3000 site discovers it needs a bigger HP Unix system during the migration process. The upgrades in disk, memory and processor are also eligible for discounts, Nishimoto added.

The talk also covers HP’s initiatives to get customers using Microsoft’s .NET services, and Nishimoto notes that “the 3000 is very much a target of this program.” Pilot projects to move customers from MPE to Microsoft’s Windows ..NET are underway, using part of the force of 1,800 consultants which HP and Microsoft have dedicated to the .NET Results Program. Resources are strongest in the manufacturing solution segments for ..NET Results. HP is the prime integrator for the project, so services are delivered by HP Services consultants.

Nishimoto makes brief mention of special incentives to finance HP 9000 systems at 3.89 percent APR over an 18-24 month contract, or defer payments for three months. She introduces the Invent9K public access development server, a free account on an HP 9000 much like the Invent3K server announced in the summer of 2001. The Invent3K system also is mentioned, with Nishimoto saying “there are a lot of people using the 3000 server, because we keep it up to date; in the middle of September we went to the 7.5 operating system on it, and customers want to try out the latest MPE features there.”

Access to either Invent3K or the HP-UX system is available by registering at jazz.external.hp.com/pads. The A-Class HP 9000 server is intended for test drives of third-party MPE-to-HP-UX migration products and HP software products, as well as getting familiar with using commands in HP-UX.

Signposts of success

HP’s message in the last 45 minutes of its portion of the tour shifts to success, throwing more light on the handful of sites which have not failed in a move to HP-UX. Customers hear the stories from Ceridian Tax Services and CT3, sites HP has been discussing since January and whose migrations took place in the mid-1990s. (See the November issue of the NewsWire for a report on these sites, as well as the proposed plans of Virginia International Terminals, the first firm to proceed with a migration on the basis of HP’s recommendation one year ago.)

New success stories surface in the room at Houston, too. Pacifica Papers, a maker of papers for commercial and printing customers, had grown by acquisition and wanted to increase database capabilities. Pacifica chose Oracle and SAP to serve its multiple divisions, and engaged with HP Services for its migration from the 3000 to the 9000. Nishimoto said the company “had better high availability and superior support. We have some of the largest environments in consulting for SAP within HP.”

The final migration story HP tells in the room includes an approach to using systems that have long been off a vendor’s support. North American Logistics (NAL), a subsidiary of North American Van Lines, is moving its $550 million operation to HP-UX servers. But some of the IT operations at NAL have been running not on its HP 3000s, but on Amdahl mainframes that are 10 years out of support.

Nishimoto said NAL’s Project Leader Larry Bollinger reported that “I have an Amdahl system that’s been out of support for 10 years. I was thinking I needed to move everything from the Amdahl to the HP 3000.”

Bollinger and NAL have decided to migrate the company’s diesel truck repair application off of the 3000 and onto the company’s HP-UX servers, saying that “We have some unique circumstances because we are a division of a larger company. We must have the right interfaces to communicate with existing systems and databases in other areas of our company. It was a challenge to find a package that was inherently flexible enough to meet our needs.”

NAL has chosen to move its in-house package written in Cognos’ Powerhouse to HP-UX and Oracle. Bollinger said the decision was made easier “because we already had in-house experience with HP-UX servers and Oracle.” The company will be using its in-house developers to do the migration. It will reconfigure a pair of HP 9000 servers and add two more to move the application off a single HP 3000.

One of several options

NAL’s option to migrate an MPE application is one of five reactions to HP’s advice to transition, HP’s Nishimoto reminds the customers taking careful notes in the three-quarters-full room. HP says that 70 customers have registered for today’s stop, but fewer than 50 have arrived. Houston is the fourth-largest city in the US, but the Greater Houston RUG meeting the week before drew better attendance than this Transition Tour meeting. The Tour was free and includes lunch, while the RUG meeting cost $25. HP seems to recognize today that its customers haven’t moved much in the first year of transition. Nishimoto outlines the five reactions to HP’s announcement: To replace, rewrite MPE apps, migrate them, retire applications or leave them on MPE. In a moment of realism, Nishimoto says that “I would expect every one of you would do all five of these migration options.” Her message implies that customers can be expected to leave some HP 3000 applications where they are for now.

News from third party app providers gets shared with the attendees to demonstrate more dramatic movement from the MPE market. Ecometry has finished an HP-UX benchmark for its e-commerce app, and will do a Windows NT benchmark in the first week of December, Nishimoto says. The majority of MPE’s packaged application providers are moving to HP’s Unix, she adds, but notes that Open Skies is coming into the HP Migration Center to do a Windows benchmark.

When selecting an option, customers are advised to ask how much will the application and the company’s needs grow; how native in the new environment should the application be when the transition is complete; and how long it should take to transition.

Leading into the lunch break for the tour stop, Birket Foster of Platinum Migration partner MB Foster promises that customers will get “an idea of how much to go ask your management for” when beginning a migration. He adds that “the risk of staying where you are grows with time,” and later asks, “So it’s a year later: what have you all been doing for the past year?”

The room’s attendees, which Foster quipped “is about half consultants today” don’t offer any answer about the lack of migration movement. They wait for Foster’s outline on expenses for the largest project that many of their IT shops will ever undertake, but they aren’t asking questions yet. They hear success stories from companies posting from $500 million to $1 billion in revenue. Later in the day, some will wonder aloud how they’ll pay for such a move in a weak economy.

Next time: Bottom lines on migration costs, how language choices get presented, and what refactoring can do for the company that’s moving an application.