WRQ surveys 3000 Transition reaction

Vendor says customers continuing to study options

One of the larger software suppliers to HP 3000 shops says its customers are still making decisions on how to respond to HP’s plan to leave the community in 2006. But WRQ expects “a big chunk of the marketplace to stay there, if it’s an option.”

David Hebert of WRQ said that companies using the firm’s Reflection emulators and Verastream integration tools are taking their time while resetting their course for 3000 investment.

“People have not fully determined what they’re going to do,” Hebert said as company officials prepared to speak at this month’s Interex e3000 Solutions Symposium. “They’re in the planning stages, and the kinds of discussions they’re having with us are of a consultative nature.”

Hebert said WRQ is “as open to what customers are saying as we are to telling them what the options are. Our stance is that regardless of what HP does, or what application software vendors decide to do, what the customer wants us to respond to is what we’re going to do.”

The director of marketing for WRQ sees a schedule where “we’ve got another couple of years of dialog with all types of customers,” both those migrating from as well as those homesteading on their 3000 systems.

Hebert said some customers who, before HP’s announcement, weren’t so likely to look at other options for hosting their applications “are taking the time to do that. This decision by HP has caused a lot of system administrators and their bosses to say ‘if we are going to have to spend money on a transition, how can we get the most out of that transition?’ ” WRQ suggests that its Verastream and Reflection products can “help them make the most of their decision.

“Customers are either going to stay on the system,” Hebert said, “port the application because it’s home-grown and they still want the same businesses and logic, or they’ll move to another platform and follow one of the HP 3000 ISVs there.”

Many of the customers who are leaving the 3000 platform “determined to do that prior to HP’s announcement,” Hebert said. Applications moved from HP 3000s to HP 9000s and accessed through terminal screens can have Reflection licenses moved at no charge, if the customer is under support.

WRQ mentioned the New School University of New York City as a longtime Reflection customer who’s swapping licenses as they move from one HP 3000 to a pair of HP 9000 servers. New School had migration plans in place before the HP announcement.

Another portion of the 3000 community won’t be moving off the platform. “I think there’s a fair amount of the user base that will choose to stay on the 3000,” Hebert said. WRQ wants to help these customers integrate their 3000s better with desktop technologies like Windows 2000 and XP, or help make the 3000s interact better with other servers, using Verastream to pull MPE data into newer applications. Verastream uses terminal IO while it bypasses the presentation layer. “It allows you to component-ize the data and extract it through an object, which can be programmed,” Hebert said.

Modernizing a custom-written terminal-based application using Reflection for Windows’ customization capabilities is another option he added. Visual Basic for Applications’ automation of repetitive tasks, using macros, can accomplish that modernization.

The automation might offset the certain costs of migration, Reflection market manager Sue Lindsey suggested. “It’s going to cost you money to port those applications to a new platform, and it’s going to be at some cost — say, $100,000. We believe if you modernize that interface you can cut other costs, such as retraining costs for employees, or simplifying business processes. If you could save $20,000 a year, you could get that cost back in five years.”

Some customers relate the HP Transition announcement “to a normal technology change in the industry,” Hebert said. “For them, change is inevitable. The reaction is somewhat neutral, because they had plans already.”

Other customers are choosing “to stay where they’re at, and use the HP 3000s as long as they can,” he added. “There’s some very strong reactions from those who want to stay put on the system.”

One more set of customers has a mixed set of reactions, Hebert added. In recent years, WRQ has built a strong business in platforms not offered by HP, and Hebert said this third group “is being courted by HP’s competitors. We’re trying to be as host-agnostic as possible, but our options are not tied to an HP solution.”

Charting the 3000 customers’ movement is just beginning, Hebert said. “It’s really early, and the only folks that are in a hurry are the application vendors on the 3000,” Hebert said. The application companies’ reactions have “shifted from crisis to opportunity,” he added.

WRQ is supporting the goals of the OpenMPE Inc. organization to extend the platform’s life, looking for a way to contribute to the emulation project at OpenMPE. Not surprising, considering WRQ began its life as a company selling software that replaced the need for HP’s hardware terminals.