Transport gathers up tools for Transition

Mix of consulting, utilities aimed at easing migration

HP’s prodding of its 3000 customers into planning for new platforms presses companies into needing new resources. Open Seas, in conjunction with North American partner Lund Performance Solutions, aims to ensure those customers won’t have to provide their own migration experience — or even the tools for the job.

Open Seas is taking the wraps off its Transport service in the wake of the HP Nov. 14 announcement, talking louder about a combination of software and services the company has already deployed in MPE migrations. Jason Kent of Open Seas said the company is reluctant to push the product, because its heart is still with the MPE community.

“It’s not simply a product, it’s a service,” Kent said. “We don’t heavily advertise it because we don’t particularly like moving people off the 3000. But people have moved off the 3000 through politics, a merger, or an acquisition.”

Since more companies using the computer may decide an OpenMPE arrangement (see story page 1) isn’t right for their 3000’s future, Kent and his partners at Lund are ready to put a unique tool to work on the task of moving applications. NearTek’s AMX, made in France and with support only in French, sits at the foundation of the Transport experience.

Kent said that using AMX grew out of an Open Seas France product called Transport, which was used to migrate the Bi-Tech accounting software from MPE to Unix years ago. “It meant they didn’t have to have two teams developing two sets of code, one for MPE and one for Unix,” Kent said. “Every week they put their MPE work in an automated routine, and it would throw out an HP-UX application on the other side.”

Open Seas began to use Transport to migrate customers from the 3000, and later moved to using AMX in migration projects that included Pitney Bowes. “We’re not looking to sell just migration software,” Kent said. “It’s the overall project management. If you do a migration you have to consider many things other than the migration of your data. IT staff and user training, the size of the new machines, which relational database you’ll go to.”

Open Seas has quietly migrated about eight companies from HP 3000s over the past eight years, in addition to its work selling its Fantasia forms software. “It’s not something a 3000 software house should be shouting from the rooftops,” Kent said. Oracle and HP-UX have been the most popular target platforms for the firms which Open Seas has migrated.

Using the AMX software, it takes between three to nine months to do a migration, Kent said. Two months prior to the HP announcement, Open Seas “started getting an awful lot of calls from HP divisions worldwide” about using AMX. “Normally we get about four inquiries a year.”

Those prior inquiries would result in companies choosing packaged software to replace home-grown applications in two cases of every three. But Kent said “as the 3000 base has declined, those who are left on it are left for a good reason: They can’t just go out and buy a replacement package for what they’ve got, because there’s nothing to model their business rules.”

Kent makes a case for transporting the existing 3000 applications to new platforms, saying that companies retain their key strengths that way. “IT managers and directors in 3000 shops have good business knowledge,” Kent said. “It’s that knowledge they need to transfer, but those people often don’t have Oracle or Unix knowledge.”

After a Transport migration, there’s an MPE shell left under Unix or NT. “You can logon with a :HELLO command, there’s a colon prompt. It looks and feels like a 3000,” Kent said. The emulation is a product of AMX, “which has a fuller support of the MPE intrinsics,” Kent said. “Of the tools we’ve used, the AMX one is the strongest. The product grows with our experience.” Open Seas’ French-speaking engineers communicate with the French engineers who’ve built AMX during the migration project.

Kent said there is some prospect of making AMX a tool for the hands-on IT staff who want to do their migration themselves. Documentation would have to be improved, “but the fact that the tool is there is a great starting point.”