Click here for Robelle sponsor message

The company will focus only on HP 3000 issues as far as its Year 2000 work is concerned. Co-founder Michael Watson, along with his partner Hank Sanford, says his company will actually perform the changes customers need to get HP 3000 applications ready for the next century. He believes that’s a unique offering in the market – because he says many Year 2000 outsourced contracts only analyze and identify problems.

“Most sites don’t have the people available to do the work,” Watson said. “By using our services, customers won’t have to pull resources from other projects. In most DP shops, nobody’s sitting around looking for work to do.” Bringing in help to analyze which parts of applications need to be changed for Year 2000 is easier to do than hiring the help to actually change the programs, he explained.

The WSR team said hand-to-hand work is likely to be required for HP 3000 applications which aren’t fully identified with $INCLUDE and COPYLIB to define all files completely. “For a lot of HP 3000 sites, none of that is defined,” Sanford said.

The work can involve areas of the HP 3000 that some managers don’t know well. Dictionary is involved in a lot of HP 3000 applications, “and a lot of people never even heard of Dictionary,” Watson said. Distinguishing between hardware and software clocks is another nuance to be considered for 3000 sites. “In the 3000 market, there’s a lot of companies out there without programmers,” Sanford added.

WSR will put a consultant onsite to inventory software and files, and then do the changes. The duo say they’ll bring in a “masters group” of additional programming staffers trained in the HP 3000 to complete projects. “We can put between 75 and 100 years of 3000 experience onsite,” Sanford said. WSR is also ready to manage a company’s staffers in performing Year 2000 fixes.

Watson, an application developer who’s the chairman of SIG-UIF/VPLUS and the co-chair of SIGCOBOL, has been working with HP 3000s since 1975. Sanford has been coding with COBOL since 1968 and had 10 years of HP experience as a 3000 SE and in HP’s labs before going independent as a consultant.

Definitions of Year 2000 compliance vary, Sanford added. “Our solutions will handle all years, not just 1999 through 2001,” he said. Intermediate solutions such as putting an alpha character in place of the century won’t stand up that long. “It may get you past December 31, 1999, but somewhere down the line you’re still going to have to do the conversion.”

“There will be a lot of people that aren’t going to make that deadline,” Sanford said, “and that’s why some of these quickie solutions will be fine. But we don’t expect this business to go away in the Year 2000, because people will be using the quick [A0] solution because of manpower and time.”

WSR will be working with a toolbox of the latest MPE/iX Year 2000 tools, such as Adager and Robelle’s SmartDate, as well as other utilities such as Vesoft’s MPEX. But the company stresses that no tool can be a complete substitute for application experience. For example, the sliding date-window solutions of MPE/iX 5.5 PowerPatch 4 won’t work for birthdays and annuity systems, a big portion of the HP 3000 application base.

New SEC requirements in place this year will demand that all publicly-owned companies publish their Year 2000 plans and expected costs, Watson said. Even with that kind of nudge, “there are a number of people that are putting their heads in the sand,” Watson said. Converting to new systems – another solution promoted instead of fixing application code – often means throwing away archived data. Licensed agencies such as healthcare providers are prevented from doing that.

Application providers’ Year 2000 work won’t be a guarantee of compliance in some cases, Sanford said. “People are counting on software companies to make their systems 2000-compliant,” he said. “In most cases customers have a lot of code they have written around the purchased software, or modified within it, that the company’s 2000-compliant release isn’t going to handle.”