Issue, Feb 08

See One User Group , page 10

See Migrations, page 8

3000 migrations in play,homesteaders in place

Speedware unfurls servicesfocus on application support

2006 targets slip for some; staying sites sound off

In the shifting world of the 3000 com-munity, the status quo has been easier topredict than the wave of the future. Amongour survey of companies which planned toleave the platform during 2006, two out ofthree have hit their target. Homesteadersremain where they expected to be work-ing, meeting challenges of support butcounting on few changes.Migrating off the platform has been an

effort that has fallen behind, but not forlack of trying. Meanwhile, the 3000 ownerwho’s homesteading until forced off the

system spoke up overthe Internet in recentweeks, identifying com-panies which are sizedboth large and small.The migration companies

reported to The 3000NewsWire in 2004 that theyplanned to be off the system before theend of 2006. The companies we surveyedidentified success with migration from the3000 to Unix platforms and Windows. Butsome have been hung up waiting onreplacement software.These customers haven’t been caught

unaware of how a migration deadline could

Migration partner, software supplier extends new service

A lot of HP 3000 customers need moretime in the Transition Era. Besidespreparing to migrate, or step away fromHP as homesteaders, their duties includeapplication maintenance and support.Speedware wants to help.The company that was one of the char-

ter Platinum Migration Partners and stillcounts many customers for theSpeedware development language adds anew service this quarter. It’s aimed at abroad range of the 3000 community,according to Speedware’s marketingdirector Chris Koppe.“We’re considering the installed base

and what’s happened to it over the years,”he said in outlining who could use inde-

pendent support of their applications.“Some are actively enhancing systems,others that are business-as-usual kind ofoperations with no enhancements.”Koppe said that through retirement

there are 3000 shops which no longerhave 3000 experts on staff today. “There’snot a huge surplus of 3000 programmersout there, and certainly they’re often notin the same city as the customer.”He described his company as “loaded

with 3000 support experts” working at24x7 pace, as well as combining off-sitemanagement with on-site presence. “Wecan give these sites what they need tokeep the 3000s running as long as theyintend to run them,” Koppe said.Other target customers for the service

include companies who are rightsizingstaff, investigating packaged applications

One user groupbands them allHP user group Encompass took a big

step toward the ultimate alliance of HPenterprise computer customers, as thelargest North American HP user groupannounced it will unite with two othergroups. Now Encompass, the Tandem-based group ITUG, and HP-InterexEurope/Middle East/Africa will all worktogether, bound under a single group

which may be named Endeavor. The ultimate name, as

well as the pendingapproval of the coalition,will be announced at theHP Technology Forum inJune. Voting on thealliance will take placein April.Interex participation

comes from outside of theUS. HP-Interex EMEA was

once allied with the now-defunctHP user group Interex, but the 33,000-member Interex EMEA survived InterexNorth America’s 2005 bankruptcy.The move nearly completes a consol-

idation of at least six user groupswhich existed in 2005. Encompass andInterex North America had worked ona few annual HP World user meetingstogether prior to that date, but whenInterex shut its doors suddenly,Encompass took on some Interexmembers. Still, groups from theNonStop/Tandem base, OpenView,overseas Interex groups andAsia/Pacific membership continued tooperate as separate advocacy andinformation points. HP had to listen toall, but wished for one group to repre-sent everybody.Board director Chris Koppe, a for-

mer Interex North America director,pointed out that Endeavor now is onlymissing the OpenView users groupVivit to complete a full HP group ros-ter. Encompass brings 16,000 mem-bers, ITUG 2,500 and Interex EMEA33,000 — but increasing the size ofthe group is not as important as themembership’s scope. HP’s liaison withcustomers will grow more focused ina single, larger group.“In the days when I was working at

Interex, this was something we allwished would happen, that the usergroups would follow HP’s path,” Koppesaid of the alliance. “Corporate merg-

See Support, page 11

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How to contact the 3000 NewsWire

ContentsFebruary ’08

ISSN 1521-124XThe 3000 NewsWire is publishedfour times yearly, plus electronicupdates, by 3000 NewsWire LLC.Contents of this publication maynot be reproduced in any form with-out express permission of the pub-lisher. Non-bylined articles are writ-ten by the editor. Publisher believesall information printed here to betrue, but cannot assume responsi-bility for errors. © 3000 NewsWireLLC. All rights reserved. Printed inthe U.S.A.

3000 migrations in play, homesteaders in place —Migrating sites havestretched 2006 deadlines — or arrived on time, just like homesteaders — 1Speedware unfurls services focus on app support — Support of 3000 appli-cations is a growth market in a community growing short on talent — 1One user group to band them all — Three HP user groups to be one for asingle larger voice with HP, as Encompass, ITUG and Interex Europe ally — 1OpenMPE runs spring vote — Six spots open up; polls close on Feb. 29 — 6GHRUG gives spring show a go — 3000 networking, training Mar. 14-15— 10Homesteaders dodge risky businesses — Resource 3000 partner Allegropoints to the biggest risk to homesteading: suppliers who go dark — 14Mac OS X: Your next Unix platform? —MacWorld 2008 showed off enterpriseability for an environment which pulled even with the Unix from HP — 15IBM offers $5 billion to purchase Cognos — Creator of PowerHouse drawsinterest for its Business Intelligence operations — 16An Anniversary That Won’t Die — Erasing a product, but not community — 18How to Do a Final 3000 Shutdown — On the day when turning off a 3000 isthe final solution, you can turn to this proven checklist of operations — 19BFree extends user counts — Product can forestall system expansion — 19Q&A: Birket Foster, Landing New Ideas for 3000s — The chairman of bothOpenMPE and MB Foster shows ways to the future for the community — 20The Wide World of the Web, by Ron Seybold — Getting bigger to be better isa move as common as clicking into the Web to succeed. This spring we watchwhile two such plays make an attempt to grab what they need by the tail — 22

3The 3000 NewsWire • February, 2008 • 3000newswire.com/blog

EditorRon Seybold ([email protected])

PublisherAbby Lentz ([email protected])

Homesteading & Support Editor: Gilles SchipperMigration Editor: Nicolas FortinAt-Large Editor: Birket Foster

Newsblog with business-day reports: 3000newswire.com/blog Archived news & tech articles: 3000newswire.com/subscribers Voicemail, alternate email: 512.331.0075; [email protected] & mail: 11702 Buckingham Road, Austin, TX 78759

Community Meetnetwork links upfor extra thanksLate last fall we gave thanks for what

we love in our lives with a big meal, con-necting with family and friends. It was arare thing for Abby and I to be awayfrom our Texas home and NewsWire’soffices on Thanksgiving day. We usuallyhost holiday guests, but this year wetook to the road, visiting my family in areunion in a little Michigan town on theleftmost edge of Lake Erie.As I sat in an Extended Stay Suites

room, waiting for all the feasting tocome, I was reminded of that E in Erie.The lake’s name still draws sniggering,maybe the same kind you’ve heard aboutthe HP 3000 in your shop. Yes, it is acomputer system older than all of therest, but as vital as any Great Lake withfreshwater. Something ancient butessential, and yes, something to bethankful for.That E also reminds me of something

Alan Yeo said about the HP 3000. HPstarted to call the system e3000 back inthe year 2000, a marketing move toprompt a new look at legacy technology.Yeo said the e stands for Enduring. It’sone of the many e-things we can givethanks for as 3000 community members:• Extensions, of support by HP to keep

the vendor officially in the 3000 busi-ness, and of support from the third partysuppliers and 3000 gear from resellers.About the only thing really missing nowis new systems.• Exploration, by the OpenMPE board,

still seeking a way to extend the prob-lem-fixing patch process once HP leavesthe community• Excellence, from the 3000 solution

suppliers who have built products withdurability and rugged design, likeAdager’s Alfredo Rego says, as if they aredeep space satellites which must operatefor years without need for maintenance,so your IT duties are more manageable• Enthusiasm, from the vendors dis-

covering new ways to migrate severaldecades of business logic to new envi-ronments. Everybody tells us that theapplication makes the most difference inchoosing a new platform. The platformmakes the most difference, however,

See Community, page 4

when the application is already writtenand reliable on the 3000 — and itrequires patience and innovation to carryit into the future.• Exactitude, from those caring for a

3000, either by proxy or at your site, aswell as the exacting development of solu-tions to mirror the talents of IMAGE,MPE/iX on other hardware, and more.Excellence is required.Experts in the system gathered on a soc-

cer day, kids’s sports day, a morning forextra sleep. The Saturday of the firste3000 Community Meet dawned with afilled room of the who’s who of the 3000

community. Or, as QSS application founderDuane Percox joked, “who’s left.”Those who were left had lots to share

and report. Rick Gilligan of bank app ven-dor CASE shared his MicroFocus COBOLexperiences with Bob Cavanagh ofAcucorp, the COBOL supplier which is nowpart of MicroFocusThe meeting reached its 50-attendee tar-

get, a larger share of partners and consult-ants than customers. But for each seat ofthe 50 which were filled at the DoubletreeHotel on San Francisco’s bayshore, a few, adozen or a hundred other HP 3000 cus-tomers were represented. The nine hoursof networking, counting breakfast, lunchand the after-meeting supper, offered aview of the future with several destinations— and no certain end of life.

HP was well represented at the meeting,a full table of engineers, managers andexperts sitting on the front row. JennieHou, HP’s e3000 business manager, updat-ed the crowd on the vendor’s new offeringsduring 2007, a talk she delivered to farfewer 3000 community members duringthe summer’s HP Technology Forum. Ofcourse, back then, HP’s limit to its 3000business was the end of 2008, not 2010.HP’s contribution to the day was hard to

overlook. For all of its IO expert firepower,community liaison connection and evenRoss McDonald’s lab director oversight, themost moving expression of the day fromHP came through a former employee whokicked off the meeting. Jeff Vance had livedin the HP mountaintop, and literallyworked from there in his most lauded andproductive years developing from home,before retiring in May.Just six months after his HP exit Vance

stood before us to testify about how alivethe future feels for him, all while a collageof 3000 division team members flashed onthe screen behind Vance. The photos cele-brated the retired and departed while mak-ing a case for how the end of life of workcannot be calculated when you love whatyou do.Lunch delivered the biggest torrent of

networking, the brightest benefit whichattendees could carry away from a surren-dered Saturday. A surprising amount of theday’s talk mapped paths and options forhomesteading. Maybe not a surprise, con-sidering that half of the community’s cus-tomers are still using HP 3000s, evenwhile some are prodding along migrationprojects. Gavin Scott of AllegroConsultants, and Stan Sieler after him,identified a short range of risks in remain-ing on the platform. Stan Sieler, the lateste3000 Contributor of the Year, explainedhow customers could avoid “Planning forFailure.”Most likely among the homesteading

risks, Sieler said, was that an MPE/iX ven-dor would go out of business unexpectedly.The irony of knowing that HP has beengoing out of its 3000 business, ever soslowly and carefully, but at first unexpect-edly — well, that wasn’t lost on me.New ideas and updates on migration

news arrived in crisp 20-minute talks.Each presenter seemed to understand thatto run overtime would be denying thecrowd a chance to hear more on a differentsolution, whether it was the emerging ITtool of Application Portfolio Management,explained and outlined by Birket Foster, orthe advances in migration techniques andstrategies, detailed by Chris Koppe.Very little of the day would have been pos-

Community(Continued from page 3)

4 The 3000 NewsWire • February, 2008 • 3000newswire.com/blog

See Community, page 6

Program opens up HP’s 3000 support toolAdvant to use Immediate Recovery’s tool to

deliver passwords for HP’s ss_update

In a story which arrived just hours before our February printdeadline, Steve Pirie of 3000 hardware support provider Advantreported that the company’s software tools partner, ImmediateRecovery Solutions (IRS), has developed a program to trans-form HP 3000 lockwords to passwords — the character stringsneeded to operate HP’s ss_update configuration program.The new SSPWD takes an HP lockword — designed to

limit use of ss_update to HP’s support personnel — anddelivers the corresponding password to start and use theservice menu tools including ss_update.HP developed ss_update as a follow-on tool to reset

3000 system board information after its SS_CONFIG soft-ware had its passwords removed. Pirie said the ss_updatesoftware, which Advant will unlock at the request of thirdparty support companies for a fee, doesn’t start with anywarning that HP restricts ss_update use to HP employees.“We’ve seen copies of SS_CONFIG which had a dis-

claimer, but it just so happens [ss_update] doesn’t, or HPdidn’t really care,” Pirie said. The ss_update program canbe a key service tool for a support company which needsto configure spare HP 3000 SPU boards. This kind of con-figuration is only available through HP’s support grouptoday, he added.The ss_update software resides on every HP 3000, he

added, a theory which might prevent HP from generatinganother follow-on program for 3000 diagnostics, as it didwhen an unlocked SS_CONFIG was used by someresellers during 1990s. HP sued and filed criminal com-plaints against Abtech, Hardware House and others in1999, claiming that SS_CONFIG was used illegally toswitch the personalities of HP RISC hardware, from HP-UX booting to MPE/iX booting systems. HP prevailed inthose suits and had California officials plea bargain withresellers in some criminal cases.The HP ss_update program contains commands to do

this kind of switching, but Pirie said it’s not the intentionof Advant or IRS to enable this. SSPWD is an MPE/iX pro-gram. “It seems to be fair game for anyone to usess_update,” he said, “since HP decided they didn’t needany disclaimers. HP’s always been particular about this.”Pirie confirmed that neither Advant or IRS has dis-

cussed SSPWD with HP. The vendor’s exit plans promptedthe creation of the IRS program.“HP announced in 2001 that they’re out of the [3000]

marketplace,” he said. “We’re developing tools that weneed. Once you announce you’re leaving the marketplace,

HP should be careful. What happens if HP is in there trying tomanipulate their options, and they didn’t leave the market-place? Then they could be liable for a lot of damages. It mightbe better if HP just left the market.”An example of the jobstream from a SSPWD unlock, then

subsequent ss_update operation, is available at the IRS Webpage www.irs4hp.com/sspwd.html. Check the 3000 NewsWireblog at 3000newswire.com/blog for updates on this report,including any response from Hewlett-Packard.

Seven run for six seatsin OpenMPE election

At press time we received the full list of nominees for posts onthis year’s OpenMPE board of directors. As in the past severalyears, the number of nominees exceed the number of seats upfor election by exactly one.Nominees new to this year’s election are Keith Wadsworth of

Orbit Software, Alan Tibbets of Strobe Data and Walter Murray of

the California Dept. of Corrections. The three are among theseven candidates competing in an election which runs through 5PM Pacific on Feb. 29.HP 3000 traing expert Paul Edwards has retired from the

OpenMPE board in mid-term, and Speedware’s Jennifer Fisherdeclined to run for another term on the volunteer advocacyboard. Incumbent members Donna Garverick, Tracy Johnson,John Wolff and Matt Perdue are running for re-election. Membership is free and available at

openmpe.org/Membership.htm, and biographies of the candi-dates are at openmpe.org/OpenMPEBoardCandidates.htm.



sible without the generous sponsorship ofcompanies like Foster’s and Koppe’s. Othersponsors to help make the Meet happen:Yeo’s ScreenJet, and Eloquence creatorMarxmeier Software AG, as well as MicroFocus, now the focal point for migration-bound COBOL solutions.Absent from the room? The veiled dis-

may and outright anger at the vendorwhich sparked all this transition. TheOpenMPE advisory sounded upbeat andhopeful, as well as full of new opportuni-ties to network. Best wishes got passedalong to the GHRUG user group confer-ence, scheduled for March 14-15 inHouston’s suburbs. Birket Foster andMatt Perdue drove through the slides thatcontinue to make a case for an independ-ent lab to on the MPE/iX source code,once HP is ready to transfer the softwarefor patching. As we have said before, HP’sService and Support sector has more tosay about the licensing timetable thanany other portion of HP.News came in modest amounts, like

the explanation of COBOL enhancementsto AcuCOBOL, offered by Acucorp whichis now a part of longtime COBOL rivalMicro Focus. Both companies sent repre-sentatives to the meet. While AcuCOBOL’smanager Bob Cavanagh fielded somepointed questions about licensingchanges once the two companies mergeto a single product, the intent of theanswers seemed clear: the combinedfirms want to do what’s needed to speedand clear the path of migration of allthose COBOL apps you run on 3000stoday.As for Abby and I, we give thanks for

the Excitement of covering a vendor’sEnd-game, to chronicle the Evolution ofyour community to an independent Entity.By the time we gave our personal, familythanks together, we passed the cross-over mark of our Existence as the 3000community’s reporters, having writtenlonger in the post-exit announcement erathan in all the months before November,2001.As we embark on the seventh spring

since that announcement, we give thanksfor every inspired tomorrow your commu-nity shares —whether it be plans, userreports and processes to ensure a smoothexit, or the gumption and desire to stay the3000 course. Have a look at our Historystory in this issue about the anniversary ofthat 2001 day, a moment that, like yourcommunity, deserved an Extra.

— Ron Seybold

Community(Continued from page 4)

Six spots open for advocacy group

For the sixth spring in a row, OpenMPEhas opened the group’s annual election.This time around, however, two-thirds ofthe board of director seats are up forgrabs.In years past that has meant that near-

ly everybody who wants to volunteer forOpenMPE can win a post by offering toserve. Candidates whose seats are expir-ing are vice-chair John Wolff, secretary

Donna Hofmeister, Matt Perdue, JenniferFisher and Tracy Johnson. Director PaulEdwards is also retiring. As of our pressdeadline, Orbit Software owner KeithWadsworth is running for a board spot. Voting continues through Feb. 29. A

membership in OpenMPE is required tocast a ballot. Getting a free membership,as well as casting a ballot, can be execut-ed through the OpenMPE Web site, open-mpe.org. The 3000 NewsWire will act as

OpenMPE runs February voting

See OpenMPE, page 15

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slip. More than three years ago, DianaWilson of Roanoke County, Va., said “Theonly reasons we would continue the 3000’suse beyond 2006 would be that we cannotfind a vendor that can offer replacementapplications or we are behind schedule inimplementing the new apps.”Those are the classic reasons for a

migration delay, and both turned out tobe slowdowns for the county, Wilson saidin an update. The county is following areplacement application strategy.“We lost about a year of time when

one of the new software vendors wentbankrupt while we were in the middle ofimplementation,” she said. “This causedus to have to start all over with the bidand award process for those applications.We’ve now selected vendors for all of theremaining applications and have imple-mentation and deployment schedules foreach. Our schedule is aggressive, but sofar it looks like we will be able to meetthe 2008 deadline.”Several of the companies have migrat-

ed all but one or two 3000 applications,systems they are keeping online forarchival purposes or just running with nomigration date. Greg Barnes of Media General reported

that “We’ve migrated all apps to HP-UXand Solaris, but we’re keeping two aroundfor archival info lookups. One for lookup,one for disaster recovery at a differentlocation. I’m the last HP 3000 systemadministrator in the company, and possi-bly in the city — so I’m always on call.”While about a third of the companies

were running late, few companies report-ed that they had changed their decisionto migrate. “Our plans fell through in2006,” said Pedro Gonzalez of the healthplan Dr. Leonard’s Healthcare. “We decid-ed to homestead with no plans for con-version at this time.”At another site, the migration has

stretched from a 2006 deadline into 2009.“Our Web Wise and Data Warehouse soft-ware modules are functional on Linux,while our batch reports and back officescreens are still functioning on the HP3000,” said John Wardenski, presidentand CTO of National College ManagementSystems. “Batch reports will go live thisfall on Linux, with our back office screensthe following summer.”Summit Racing Systems, whose migra-

tion has been publicized by severalmigration suppliers, remains behindschedule. “We are still in the very slowprocess on migrating off the HP 3000,”said Ron Pizor in IT Operations. “The

current migration date is July 4, 2008.Not sure if we will make it. Later in theyear would be more realistic.”For every delayed migration, however,

two more said they just about hit the endof ’06 plans offered to us during our pollin 2004.“We did make it off the 3000, but later

than originally planned,” said LaneRollins of Boyd Coffee Company. Theorganization migrated in July, 2007rather than by the end of 2006.“Some of the delay was due to also

replacing our handheld computer systemthat our route trucks use,” Rollins said.“We had health-related issues pop up onthe core team, and that slowed us down.”Rollins’s company originally planned to

have a go-live date of Fall, 2005 for itsreplacement applications. He told us dur-ing his 2004 reply that surveying busi-ness processes was invaluable in makinga successful migration.“I can’t say enough about value of

doing the process mapping. We are a104-year-old company and there is a lotof baggage. I knew we had some brokenprocesses, but until we got into it I didn’trealize how bad some were. We’ve done alittle future state mapping, but for themost part that is waiting until we haveselected the vendor.”Jennie Rethman of Mac Equipment

reported that Oracle’s E-Business Suitesreplaced the company’s 3000, “andOracle is working out great for us.” MAN-MAN was running the manufacturer’sdata operations until 2006. IT managerWill Bauman of Kato Engineeringchecked in to say that “we have migratedall the applications except for one. Thatmigration should be done by the end ofthe first quarter of 2008.”Some delays revolve around end-users

in a company’s base. “We did not stick tothe 2006 date, but the primary applica-tion was converted to HP 9000 in July,2007,” said Paula Brinson of HamptonRoads Sanitation District. “We’re still suf-fering conversion pains and the usershave chained themselves to the legacysystem to prevent my decommissioning.They are using it for various data valida-tion activities.”In one case, a migration has been

delayed because the customer is waitingon a Linux version of their current HP3000 application. Sutter County, CaliforniaSchools plans to migrate once its vendor’sLinux version is ready for them.Even Unix can be an environment left

behind in the process, however. KenWilliams reported that the Azusa PacificUniversity already moved its 3000 appli-cations to Sun’s Unix — but it’s leaving

Sun’s platform by 2009, “and we havebuyers for the Unix boxes, also.”The IT managers of some companies

expressed the usual regrets about switch-ing off 3000s. “The HP 3000 applicationwas replaced with a Windows-basedpackage, said Byron Youngstrom ofWeyerheuser. “I miss the HP.”

Homestead determinationMeanwhile, the homesteading commu-

nity checked in on the OpenMPE mailinglist in recent weeks. Terry Simpkins, ITDirector of Measurement Specialties, saidhis firm is using HP 3000 systems for“general ledger, accounts payable, inven-tory control, purchasing, productionscheduling, order entry, and invoicing.With 11 locations around the world, wehave a substantial investment in its con-tinued operation.”Simpkins, who has established manu-

facturing IT operations in China over thepast five years, was a customerspokesman in ads for HP 3000s in theyears just prior to HP’s exit plans.Zelik Schwartzman of Estee Lauder

Companies said “We are activelyinstalling SAP; however as far as the HP3000 is concerned we anticipate this sys-tem will be around for many many yearsto come as we use it as our MRP engine.”Catherine Litten of Valley Presbyterian

Hospital said even through another infor-mation system has replaced its 3000, “itdoesn’t look like the HP 3000 will begoing away, as it has become our datarepository for historical reporting.”Even a successful migration won’t turn

off a large 3000 installation. Mark Ranftof Pro 3k said that “My largest client hasover 30 HP 3000 systems. Most of theseare N-Classes with a few large K-Classsystems tossed in. They are hard at worktrying to complete their migration. Thetime and effort required to migrate willcontinue until at least 2011. After that,the systems will remain for historicalpurposes.”Several customers who sounded off on

the OpenMPE list hailed from largeinstallations such as Ranft’s client, andthey pointed to the 3000’s extraordinarylifespan. Peter Martin, the IT Operations

Manager for Chubb Electronic SecuritySystems, said his company runs three HP3000s “for the foreseeable future.“Although all systems have HP supportthrough 2010, Martin plans to use theindependent support market to keep the3000s running, in spite of HP’s strategy.“I think the problem is the 3000 was

too good, with no built in obsolescence,”he said. “That’s why HP killed it — nofuture revenues outside of support.”


Migrations(Continued from page 1)

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Spring GHRUG show is a goMarch Houston meet includes 3000 tracks

Bouncing back from a delay of sixmonths, the GHRUG user group’s two-dayconference is proceeding to its March 14-15 dates, including Alfredo Rego ofAdager as its keynoter. The GHRUGInternational Technology Conference, tobe held in the shadow of the NASA’sJohnson Space Center, is a go.The five-track meeting promises up to

70 speaker slots, with many already filledin at the event’s Web site. The Universityof Houston Clear Lake Campus, justsouth of the city and on the way to theGulf of Mexico’s springtime shores, willhost the meeting.Registration is underway for a meeting

that will include tracks on Homesteadingand Migration education, as well as a fulltrack on the useful and efficient HP bladeserver technology. A PDF form from theGHRUG conference site (www.ghrug.org/ghrug.htm) to be returned to the usergroup by e-mail or postal means, getsyou in for $175. Sponsors of the eventhave 20 free attendee passes each to dis-tribute to reduce the cost even further.GHRUG is working with HP user group

Encompass to promote the event, accord-ing to reports. The speaker lineup relatedto HP 3000s includes some of most expe-rienced experts in the field for theHomesteading and Migration tracks.Paul Edwards and Gilles Schipper, both

independent support providers and expe-rienced in HP 3000 techniques, willspeak in the Homestead track. Migrationspeakers include Platinum Partners MBFoster and Speedware, both companieswhich delivered high-grade talks on thestate of transition during last fall’s e3000Community Meet by the Bayside.Other sessions include updates on Java

for the HP 3000, and OpenMPE directorAnn Howard leading two days of instruc-tion on HP’s blade server technology.Blades, according to Scott Hirsh of HP’sleading reseller Logicalis, are a solutionbest-suited to the customer who’s choos-ing HP as their replacement vendor.Add the esteemed Unix guru Bill

Hassell and best practices talks on sub-jects such as application portfolio man-agement, and you’ve got a very full twodays of education. Plus, you could arguean extraordinary value at $175.The event has a low rate on hotels,

ers are one of those things where somebodydecides to buy somebody else. User groupsdon’t come together as quickly, but I thinkthis is getting close to where we want to be.Individually it was very hard to get HP’sattention, and that model now changesgoing forward.”Users of all the groups, which include

Encompass Asia/Pacific, will receive a freeone year membership to the combinedgroup. There’s no financial problems toresolve by combining the groups, accordingto Encompass board president Nina Buik.“We’re coming together from a position of

strength, so everyone was fine financially,”she said. “Each of the groups could havekept going as they were. But we can growmore effectively together.”HP 3000 community members may have

an expanded advocacy opportunity in thecombined group, according to Buik. “There’ssome key advocacy this larger group canprovide for that community, especially whenit comes to certification.”HP has announced it will be suspending

its HP 3000 certifications as of June 1 in ashutdown of many cert programs. (See ourblog for more details.)Encompass spread the news through a

press release on its Web site, two weeks ofWebinars, plus a blog entry from Buik todefine the new association. Merger, shesays, is not the right word to describe what’sbringing together thousands of members.“The word merge implies that someone,

or rather a group, is giving up something,”Buik said in her entry, “and that’s not thecase here and couldn’t be further from thetruth. We are uniting from positions ofstrength and equity bringing the best of ourcomplementary skills together in the neworganization.”She added that Encompass will be

“putting this before the membership for avote this spring.” Koppe said Hewlett-Packard has been hopeful this kind of con-solidation would happen among user organ-izations.“Today, all of these organizations have a

much higher level of sponsorship in HPthan they had in the past,” he said. “HP hasbeen quite supportive of the idea of usdoing this [unification]. They’ve taken aback seat in it and don’t want to be pushingit, because it’s not their organization.”Combining the groups into a single unit

“has the ability to carry more weight withinHP as an advocacy source,” Koppe said. “IfHP wants to know what their customers aresaying, here’s the largest group of their cus-tomers, and they’re all highly organized. Theability to effect change on HP will be much

One user group(Continued from page 1)

See Spring GHRUG, page 14

to replace HP 3000 apps. “Along comesthe business with critical enhancementsthat will get them into new technologies,and in the meantime, who’s going to dothe HP 3000 maintenance? Who’s goingto keep the business running for twothree years while those projects go on?”Outsourcing applications support will

be a growth business during 2008, withSpeedware among several companiesthat want to step forward with the serv-ice. Pivital Solutions, which made thetransition from authorized HP reseller toindependent support provider, counted onsupporting ERP sites which used thePowerBuilder application.The Support Group, founded on the

MRP and ERP expertise of Terry Floyd,has been supporting MANMAN applica-tions since the 1990s for customer sites.Speedware offers a support service thatbroadens its scope to include nearly anyapplication.Data warehousing projects, analytics or

a new Web presence can keep even ahomesteading 3000 site busy, Koppe said,creating a need to outsource applicationsupport.“One of the problems we see,” he said

“is that the people who are currentlymaintaining the HP 3000 applicationshave been there a long time. They reallyknow how the business works and how itinteracts with the applications. Those arethe knowledge workers have a criticalstrain on them. They are key resourcesfor other projects, and [our app support]is a way to backfill the more mundaneparts of their jobs.”

Experts availableOther companies have offered this kind

of service to the community up to now,but Koppe believes the Speedware sup-port can call on more resources.“If you walked around the Speedware

offices you’d just find an army of HP 3000programmers and experts, people who’veeither relocated here to Montreal or oth-ers who live on a more permanent basis.It’s almost like the retirement home forthe 3000.” The company is always hiringor contracting with 3000 experts, headded, because it has “a huge amount ofprojects that we’re dealing with.”Speedware has doubled in size over the

past two years, Koppe explained, both ata revenue level and a staff level, while itsservices department “has quadrupled ormore.”

Support(Continued from page 1)


Ask A Migration ExpertWeb-based Speedware service offers

free advice, answers questions

The 3000 community bristles with spots to ask questions, including the HP3000 newsgroup, engagements with consultants, and even initial meetingswith prospective migration suppliers. Speedware has opened several Webpages to gather and then answer questions for free.The Ask a Migration Expert page is “another avenue to ask questions,” said

Speedware’s marketing director Chris Koppe. The site, at speedware.com/solu-tions/HPe3000_migration/ask-migration-expert.html, taps “an unmatched tal-ent pool here,” he said.The goal is to expose Speedware’s group of HP

3000 experts to the community, “and let more thanjust our customers benefit from it.” Questions aredirected to the Speedware experts who provideanswers through a separate Frequently AskedQuestions page,speedware.com/solutions/HPe3000_migration/ask-questions.html.Migration brings a lot of attention through the Web, Koppe added, and some

questions arrive from misdirected but earnest people looking for advice onimmigration, or emigration.“We’ve gotten questions from a person in the Philippines like, “Is it open to

Ireland government for Filipinos? What is the qualification to migrate inIreland?’ Or from a person in Iran: ‘How can I take a visa from your embassy inIran? is it possible for me to go to the Netherlands?’ “Speedware will be enhancing the Ask a Migration Expert service over the

next few months, he added. “Having it at our site is useful, but having it visi-ble from other sites and allowing other people to benefit from it is a betteruse of it.”

See Support, page 17

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Success Storyw/girl

Supplier demise ranks as top challenge

Long ago, it seems, HP said that risks revolve around using theHP 3000 as a mission-critical platform. There are risks in usingany computing solution, from security breaches and malware to thegeneral malaise of applications and platforms which under-per-form while being over-promised, or exhibit flash-of-light lifespans.For the HP 3000 site which homesteads, however, a risk does

not lie in MPE/iX, IMAGE or the hardware that hosts those twomarvels of software. No, the prospective fault lies not in our-selves, as customers, but in those stars of suppliers, to twist abit of Shakespeare around. Put more plainly, providers going outof business pose the greatest risk, according to Resource 3000’sStan Sieler.Sieler, who’s part of the Allegro Consultants’ brain trust,

addressed the question at the most recent e3000 CommunityMeet in the Bay Area. “The biggest risk I’ve seen is vendors goingout of business,” he reported. “We’ve had customers usingBradford’s SPEEDEDIT, and SPEEDEDIT has a bug in it as of2007 which made it stop running because of a weird clock limita-tion.” Allegro patched around the problem for those customers.Bradford Business Solutions supports SPEEDEDIT no more.But there’s a more widespread risk: Being unable to move any

application or solution from one system to another. Upgrade your3000 at the sweet prices of today and you might find some pro-grams are frozen onto the older hardware.HP suggested just this scenario when it said the 3000’s

“ecosystem” was at risk before HP decided to curtail its HP 3000business plans. Looking into the matter’s history is a matter of

chicken-or-egg coming first. Would Bradford Business Systemshave gone so dark by 2007 if HP had maintained its 3000 busi-ness? Difficult to tell, but any system vendor dropping out of theserver’s market certainly doesn’t help.What helps avoid this risk is choosing long-term, stable HP

3000 suppliers, ones with a lengthy track record and an avoweddedication to continuing to serve your community. HPSUSAN num-bers identify new HP 3000 servers; active and dedicated vendorscan accommodate new HPSUSAN numbers. Gone-dark vendors’software can only run on older system HPSUSAN numbers.Sieler suggested one way to solve the problem might be con-

tacting HP to request a move of an old HPSUSAN number to anew server. After all, every customer is paying $400 to have eachMPE/iX license transferred from old server to newly purchasedsystem.There’s little a customer can count upon, either from HP or a

gone-dark vendor, to dodge this kind of software risk. But Sielermentioned another risk that’s cropping up. “I’ve seen a surprisingnumber of sites that have hit the Third Bear of IMAGE, from FredWhite’s paper,” he said.This third bear is “BABY BEAR,” wrote White, who created the

IMAGE database along with Jon Bale at HP. “It is represented by‘paths,’ another feature whose misuse, while normally not disas-trous, may have a negative effect on response time and/orthroughput.”White’s exacting and detailed paper is available to read either

online at the Adager Web site, or as a downloadable PDF file.But the awareness of this bear will depend on who’s left at a3000 customer base who understands the database at the heartof their 3000.“They’re running along fine, and suddenly their database stops

performing well,” Sieler said. “It’s a problem that’s well-known inthe 3000 community, but [it’s] only [identified] if they have peo-ple in their business who know anything about the 3000. That’swhen people call me with sudden performance problems.”The way to beat the bear is the same solution as dodging the

HPSUSAN and new bug risks: HP 3000 expertise, engaged eitherthrough a support contract with a third party, or continuing yoursupport with an application or tool provider. Risk aversion is theHP 3000 owners’ hallmark. Keeping a budget alive to maintainlinks to expertise is a 3000 habit which can avoid risky business.Just because the HP 3000 lunch has gotten inexpensive doesn’tmean it’s free.

Spring GHRUG(Continued from page 10)


leverage extend protect

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with options that run from $69 to $99 a night. GHRUG hasreserved a block of suites at $99 per night at the Residence Inn,just down the street from the conference venue at the Universityof Houston Clear Lake campus. You can call the hotel directly tomake your reservation: 800-804-6835. There’s also a BestWestern NASA another mile down the street with a $69 rate onhotels.com. (But the conference has its rooms reserved at theResidence Inn, if you want to support the user group’s efforts.)Since the GHRUG conference is within two miles of the Space

Center, there’s accommodations a-plenty. The user group has amap of the options on its conference Web site.Time and travel costs often turn out to be the deal breakers in

getting a pass to get yourself trained. GHRUG’s meeting couldcost less than $500 for the conference fee and hotel, not countingthe cost of driving or airfare.

Homesteaders dodge risky businesses


“neutral observer” for the voting.The group is aimed being ready to act in the month when HP’s

explicit involvement with the HP 3000 will end, currently set atDecember, 2010. One of the three directors in OpenMPE whose seatisn’t up for grabs, chairman Birket Foster, has long said the groupwants to make sure the operating environment is tucked away safelyin HP’s hibernation caverns, so the 3000 community can wake it upfor patches in the future. (See Foster’s Q&A in this issue.)One of the few genuine benefits of being on this board is the

chance to hear from HP directly on the platform’s future, with per-haps more candor than a reporter can get. That’s what the manda-tory confidentiality agreement will earn members, along with theinformation about the 3000’s remaining days at HP. There’s alwaysthe chance that a director’s actions can influence HP’s, too. Thatoutcome would be the best any volunteer could hope for in servingon this board.

MacWorld shows enterprise as Apple’s Unix pulls even

By Ron Seybold

Go ahead and snigger, or scoff. Dismiss another version ofUnix if you want. But when you’re considering a replacement forthe HP 3000 in your enterprise, you could think beyondWindows. Being on a road trip to MacWorld, as I have been,makes it easier to picture OS X as your next MPE/iX alternative.We have posted stories about enterprise level applications on

our blog last year, during the 2007 MacWorld. This conference in2008 was about much more than iPhone holders or other light-weight products. Never mind about this year’s Steve JobsTurtleneck Talk, sending out hours of hot air with the newMacBook Air portable. This conference also has an IT track,where the advice to managers mentioned a major change forApple’s environment.OS X is now one of just four Unix implementations with official

certification.The official Unix 03 certification, which entitled the company

to use the Unix brand, came from the Open Group thanks in partto the efforts of Apple’s OS boss Kevin Van Vechten. His teamputs Mac OS X Leopard alongside the Big Three: Sun, IBM, andHP, according to Infoworld.Among those big three, HP really wants to sell the 3000 cus-

tomer HP-UX. Except oops, that environment doesn’t have adesktop client. OS X does. That’s an advantage which sure cutsdown on the learning curve.Then there’s the question of app availability. There are company

suppliers for large enterprises here, though not the SAP-level solu-tion peddlers. But that absence is not really a bad thing for theaverage HP 3000 shop, serving a small to medium business (SMB).A few examples show the range:Hansaworld Enterprise, just entering the US after 70,000 cus-

tomers landed in 90 countries. Not all of it OS X; the vast suiteof ERP, CRM and all that surrounds those key apps, well, it runsunder Windows and Linux, too.MacPractice, a series of programs to serve the small medical

practice. So tailored they’ve got magnetic imaging, dentist, familypractice and even chiropractic versions. The HP 3000 has a den-tal practice solution, so MacPractice could step in. Even work

under that standard Unix.Lightspeed, a Point of Sale and e-commerce integrated solu-

tion for retail sites. Web sales, storefront — you can even checkon daily sales from an iPhone.There’s more, like a slick shipping package from TrueShip,

ReadyShipper, that prints the required 4x6 labels on standardAvery forms, a subscription-based app for just $20 a month withthe latest UPS and USPS rates and rules. This is the kind ofapplication which the small HP 3000 shop could deploy.The biggest impetus to starting the shift to Mac OS X turns out

to be tradition: the traditional think tank report from the likes ofGartner, claiming OS X isn’t enterprise-ready. (Don’t tell that toGenentech, which has been running its company on Macs formany years.)The other roadblock will be the remaining IT staff, often versed

and comfortable in the Windows solutions. At the IT Conferencehere, the customers who spoke suggested a sell to your compa-ny’s top execs. Most of the time on the desktop, the calls are1:10, Macs to Windows machines. That’s productivity for bothusers and help desks.Finally, there’s a swelling support for open source solutions

that work well with OS X. The 3000 sites that are leaning towardLinux will do well to measure open source options for both Linuxand OS X.By the way, some of your community’s most savvy developers

are using Macs on their desktops now. And loving it, even afteryears of Windows. You don’t need to wear a black turtleneck tobelieve them, either.

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OpenMPE(Continued from page 6)

IBM tendered an offer to purchase Cognos, the maker ofPowerHouse development software for the HP 3000 as well asWindows-based Axiant, the development environment Cognosoffers to migrating HP 3000 sites.The deal will put $5 billion on the table to acquire Cognos, a

company whose product line and IT focus has settled squarelyin the business intelligence marketplace for many years now.SAP and Oracle recently snapped up BI providers, and theCognos stock moved from the middle $40s to above $50 a sharesince Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion Solutions.IBM offers to pay $58 per share in cash for Ottawa-based

Cognos, a 9 percent premium over Cognos’ $52.98 closing priceon Friday. The stock settled in at a closing price of $57.15 aftertoday’s trading. In an IBM press release, the company said that “Following

completion of the acquisition, IBM intends to integrate Cognosas a group within IBM’s Information Management Software divi-sion, focused on Business Intelligence and PerformanceManagement. IBM also will appoint current Cognos Presidentand CEO, Rob Ashe, to lead the group, reporting directly toGeneral Manager, Ambuj Goyal.”With HP announcing its exit from the 3000 market, Cognos

recently offered a mature product support plan through 2009for the MPE/iX version of PowerHouse. HP followed suit aboutsix weeks later with its own Mature Product Support deal forthe 3000 and MPE/iX, through 2010.Reaction from the PowerHouse mailing list about the acquisi-

tion has been limited to customers and long-time consultants asof this afternoon. But one Canadian user of PowerHouse tipped

his hat to a historic partner in the 3000’s legacy. Cognos, afterall, began as Quasar Systems in the middle 1970s, selling thefirst independent report writer for the 3000 as its only product.Quiz made Cognos possible.“Mind you, quite a success story,” said Guy Werry, Senior

Systems Analyst of Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting Co. Ltd. Onthe mailing list he posted, “From a smallish consulting companywith an in-house report writer to a $5 billion company in about30 years? Not too shabby.”David Ivey of id Enterprises says that the IBM purchase is a

clear signal that the 3000 customers who use PowerHouseneed to get seriousabout moving off their3000s. The acquisitionis both “an opportunityand a spark” for hiscompany which hasspecialized in HPPowerHouse develop-ment through the pasttwo decades, as well as its more current offerings of migration,Ivey says. Primary targets for migrating PowerHouse sites areWindows solutions, especially employing Visual Basic and VisualStudio.“IBM’s purchase once again emphasizes that the 3000 has a

limited lifetime, and you need to make preparations to move offit,” he said. “You need to have a plan and get busy.”“I love Cognos and PowerHouse, and it’s been fabulous for my

company,” he said. Large complex systems could be churnedout “so much faster than in Business BASIC or COBOL. ButPowerHouse’s time is gone now.”He added that PowerHouse “doesn’t just quit working” to

prompt a swift and emergency exit from the platform. But whenone of the largest software companies in the world takes in acompany for millions in cash, it will look closest at the biggestearner among Cognos businesses. Not the best of prospects forlooking after PowerHouse’s future.Most community observers and experts such as Ivey agree

that IBM has little interest in the Application Development Tools(ADT) segment of the Cognos business. The group which stillreleases updates and minor upgrades to PowerHouse generatesless than 5 percent of the Cognos revenues. No, IBM wanted toacquire the Business Intelligence customers and products in theCognos stable.Ivey said he sees little chance for any company to extract the

ADT group from PowerHouse. Negotiations with IBM are a com-plex matter. More to the point, there’s the limited prospects ofa new owner increasing the PowerHouse user base againstmore modern solutions. This would be essential to buying outthe PowerHouse business to turn a profit.“I don’t see how anybody [who purchased the ADT group]

could survive in a world with Microsoft and those tools that areout there now,” he said. “Why should I go to a proprietary[development] platform that nobody’s ever heard of, — whosesoftware costs are expensive — when I can go to platforms thateverybody knows about and there are programmers all over thestreet who can code in them?”Ivey added that his company, which supports PowerHouse sites

as well as helps to migrate them, “has customers on the 3000who haven’t taken an update in 10 years — and I wouldn’t letthem, because there’s no point to it.” Locked down PowerHouse

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IBM will look closest atthe biggest earner amongCognos businesses, and

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Trailing apps in migrationsAnother 3000 scenario where outside support can help is in a

migration site, Koppe said, which has most of its applicationsmoved to a new system. But a few apps remain on the 3000,apps which need supporting until they can be moved along withthe rest of the system.“A packaged system could cover 90 percent of the 3000 apps,

but a customer won’t move the other 10 percent, “becausethey’ll die out naturally over the next three years or so.”Some customers are using applications they took over when a

vendor went out of business 10 years ago, while others havemodified packaged apps so much that the application vendor“wants nothing more to do with it.” Outsourced support canhelp in either case, Koppe said.

Replacing support with new toolsCompanies run HP 3000s which support 20 to 40 percent of

the business without any more 3000 programmers around,Koppe said. In these and other cases, application support can bea part of a permanent engagement, where Speedware takes overfor a company’s help desk, deploys Web-based knowledge baseSpeedware tools for support. “A lot of it tends to be remote,where we’re VPN connecting and handing requests for the appli-cation improvement. We can tailor it around a customer.”Validating the quality of outside support can be an issue

unless the support company submits to a Support CenterPractices (SCP) certification, Koppe said. “We have either afull-time or half-time person whose job is to make sure we gothrough this certification process every year — and that we’refollowing the processes that we laid out.”

Support(Continued from page 11)

apps are the most common kind in the3000 community.One unique benefit of the PowerHouse

offering is its QSCHEMA, a repository ofdata dictionary items which allPowerHouse apps call upon. Ivey saideven when moving away from the diction-ary, he doesn’t believe much will be lost.His migration strategies for clients oftenreplace the IMAGE database withMicrosoft’s SQL Server.Moving the schema to Windows can be

done with some third party tools, “but thedatabase structure differences that youget don’t gain a lot. I recommend bringingthe schema over as a text file and thenjust cut and paste some of the names. It’salmost better to type in a lot of thatdirectly than to try and convert it.”The data dictionary “is a big deal, and Ihave looked for a similar on the Microsoftside, and I haven’t been able to find onethat was satisfactory,” he added.But PowerHouse is not a graphical envi-ronment, and “a screen that I can do in aminute with Visual Studio, or C+ or S-

Sharp lets me import graphics with adrag and drop.”The PowerHouse and Axiant operations

are a small part of the Cognos business,but the company insists that the productsand their customers are a profitable seg-ment. When consultant Robert Edis specu-

lated on the fallout from the late 2006Cognos-Speedware alliance, Edis said thatdevelopment was likely to cease.PowerHouse product manager Bob Deskinreplied that “Eventually everything comesto an end. But we have a while to go yet.”IBM, to its credit, maintains products

much longer than nearly all other ven-dors. The AS/400 server business, rootedin 1970s systems, has morphed severaltimes during the last decade to includethe latest in IBM hardware and softwaretechnology, the i5 series. Charles Finleyof Transformix, an HP migration solutionsand consultancy, pointed this out on the

PowerHouse list.“The saving grace is that IBM does not

seem to pull the plug on any softwareproduct that produces recurring revenue.My guess is that they will do what theyhave done with [the database] Informix.They keep supporting it but they do notenhance it much. At the same time theyoffer substantial migration paths to otherIBM offerings.“What I mean is that they offer a com-

prehensive solution including tools andservices to help customers change tosome product and technologies that IBMconsiders sustainable in the current soft-ware markets.”The PowerHouse mailing list is visited

often by Cognos product managerDeskin. In the near future it’s possiblethat Deskin will weigh in with a “nochanges in the immediate future” mes-sage, a communique that’s common inthe weeks after an acquisition announce-ment. As these consolidations becomethe norm for the larger 3000 partners —Speedware and Acucorp come to mind— the results of the deals take years tosurface. Change sometimes does notsurface at all, even if everything doesend eventually.

Cognos(Continued from pervious page)

IBM, much to its credit,maintains products farlonger than nearly all

other vendors.

By Ron Seybold

Only once in the history of The 3000NewsWire has a specific date appearedon our front cover. The day rattledthrough your HP 3000 community morethan six years ago, when HP announcedits exit from three decades of the HP3000 business.More than four years ago, HP 3000

customers and friends around the globeheld a World Wide Wake for the system,gathering to raise a glass in toasts andrevive the memories around more than30 years of success using this computer.But just last November, 50 or so of the

community’s most curious and connectedmember networked in San Francisco overa weekend. And the fellow sparking thee3000 Community Meet, 2007? Thatwould be ScreenJet’s Alan Yeo, who alsoinaugurated the idea of a wake for yoursystem on that 2003 day when HPstopped selling the 3000.On that November day in 2001, the

badge of “homesteader” was born on ourpages. We had to call the majority of thecommunity something, and “non-migrator”just didn’t feel right. Neither did the deci-sion to cut off a good product line thatwasn’t growing as fast as the HP CEO

wanted. But we’ve all moved on from thatday, haven’t we? You’re learning what’snext, or gathering your independentresources to homestead awhile — through2010 and beyond, by all reckoning.Within a few days of that sixth anniver-

sary, out on the 3000 Internet news-group, a hardy soul offered a bit ofgallows humor about a return tothe 3000 community. “Welcome tothe bread lines,” he said, as anoth-er 3000 veteran announced hisreturn to the newsgroup’s specialmembership.We don’t want to get too reli-

gious here. But if the life of the3000 customer in 2007 takesplace in a breadline, it might beone forming behind the “loaves andfishes for all” kind of line. Theecosystem looked shocked to get its earlyobituary in 2001 from HP. Today it lookslike a long line of companies ready tohelp you go or stay. This was my ferventhope in that dark week of 2001 — thatyou all would rally and keep your owncounsel about the right time to movealong to new horizons. It’s much harder to break up a commu-

nity than to take a product off a price list.I’ve told my story about hearing the HP

exit news a few days early during an HPbriefing. I was on vacation in Europe withmy son Nick, about as far out of positionas a newsman can get when a storybreaks. A trans-Atlantic phone interviewdelivered the patter about HP’s shutdown.I got back to the office to see a host of

“Have you heard this?” e-mails sitting onmy Mac.(Being a Mac owner of more than 14

years at the time, I was used to hearingthe world report an early obituary aboutbeloved computers. Over the past 90days, Apple eclipsed Hewlett-Packard inmarket cap value. You never know.)I didn’t have to wonder what I would

write in Europe after hearing two hoursof talk from marketing manager ChristineMartino and general manager WinstonPrather. HP had not thought enoughabout the practices and faith of its 3000base. It would take much longer than fiveyears to move mission critical programsto the Next Great Thing. I suspected thatthere would be plenty of debate on whatexactly the Next Great Thing would turnout to be, aside from how to get there.HP proposed its Unix. HP bought

Compaq, and then Windows really tookoff as a migration destination. Now theworld is turning toward open sourcesolutions, and Web-based systems. Whocan say what the options will be by 2010for a migration destination?Six years ago, HP predicted an ecosys-

tem would rise up to aid the customer inmigration. Wirt Atmar, a scientist and asardent an advocate as the 3000 ever had,replied with his view of who’d be left inyour community, doing business, in theera up through 2006.“As a card-carrying, board-certified

evolutionary ecologist, let me say for therecord that the part of the ‘ecosystem’that will spring to life and look at thedeath of the HP 3000 as an opportunityare technically called ‘carrion-feeders.’That’s not to say that they’re not a neces-


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sary part of the ecosystem. It’s just that most people rarelyaspire to the role.”But just as in many a calamity, there’s been the chance to do

great help throughout this period, all while watching the stub-born head-scratching we’ve seen. Mostly help from those in theknow who remain in your community, ideas offered and prod-ucts and companies built up. There’s been the fun in spreadingthe reports on this endgame, one which has gone into doubleovertime now, two extensions’ worth of support from HP —support that has ceased to be a migration motivator, or even amajority choice for the 3000 community members who remain.But during this seventh year beyond HP’s exit announcement,

raise a glass and toast the uncertain nature of the future. Tell astory to someone about the days when HP boasted of 70,000HP 3000s running worldwide, all headed full tilt toward theRISC hardware which both IBM and Digital had discarded. NowHP owns Digital, and IBM believes enough to build its own RISCprocessors.You just never can tell who will live, who will die, or when a

community will go dark. It was a rainy, cold night in Europe in2001 when my partner Abby shared what seemed like darknews about our community. HP seemed certain that a storm ofchange was already massing. But keep your head up, lookingand learning, and remember that having a community makes itpossible, like Rogers and Hammerstein wrote, to believe:When you walk through a stormhold your head up highAnd don’t be afraid of the dark.At the end of a storm is a golden skyAnd the sweet silver song of a lark.Walk on through the wind,Walk on through the rain,Tho’ your dreams be tossed and blown.Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart And you’ll never walk alone.

Anniversary(Continued from pervious page)

Safe switch-off requires careful steps

Not long ago, a customer asked how to turn off an HP 3000once and for all. While this could be a sad time for the IT expertwho’s built a career on MPE knowledge, doing a shutdown bythe numbers is in keeping with the rest of the professional skill-set you can expect from a 3000 manager.Chris Bartram, who has launched and stocks a Technical

Wikipedia (TWiki) for the 3000, offered all the details of turningoff an HP 3000. “I have just performed last rites for a 9x8 serv-er at a customer site,” he replied, “and have been through theexercise a couple times before.”His steps did not include SOX requirements, but “might be use-

ful,” he said in his usual modest introduction. There are 10 stepsBartram details before switching off the 3000’s power button.Bartram reported that he first purged all accounts except sys,

hpspool, and 3000devs (and had to log off all jobs, shut downthe network, and disable system UDCs to do that). Then:2) Reset/blanked all system passwords (groups, users,

accounts)3) Purged all groups from SYS account that I could (aside

from in-use groups) as well as all users except

MANAGER.SYS,OPERATOR.SYS, MANAGER.HPSPOOL.4) Went through PUB.SYS listf (file by file) looking for any-

thing that might be a job stream or contain user data (or any-thing not critical to keeping the system up) and PURGEd it5) Went into VOLUTIL and condensed my discs6) Created a group called JUNK.SYS (you would need to do

this on each volset; this box only had the system vol set)7) Wrote and ran a short script that copied NL.PUB.SYS (the

largest file remaining on the system) into JUNK.SYS in a loopusing filenames A####### and X####### until all disc spacewas used up8) Typed the command PURGEGROUP JUNK.SYS9) Went into NMMGR and changed IP addresses on the box to

something bland/different; including the default gateway (alsodeleted any entries in the NS directory if there are any)10) Sequentially PURGE @.GROUP.ACCT for all groups (leav-

ing PUB.SYS until last)11) Shut down the box.I am reminded of the line from Citizen Kane: “Then, as it must

for every man, death came to Charles Foster Kane.” Nothingescapes death, but a proper burial seems in order for such alegendary system.

How to Do a Final HP 3000 shutdown

Software pushes up 3000 capacity

Software developer Allegro Consultants is one of thestrong arms of the relatively new Resource 3000 alliance,but the legendary company continues to create new solu-tions for the 3000 community as it has for more than twodecades. Allegro’s Stan Sieler reported that the company’snew BFree tool is giving customers an additional 25 percentuser capacity — which could postpone 3000 hardwareupgrade requirements.“We’ve released our BFree product, Sieler said. “Our first

customer reported the latest BFree status with 1,650 userslogged on:

Extent B-tree status:# in useentries Table size %full #saved———— ————— —— ———129,691 199,728 64% 28,255

BFree has saved 14.1% of the Extent B-Tree table

Sieler added, “This translates that they were maxing outat about 1700 to 1800 users — they can now get another400 users online!”A developer must know the b-tree capabilities of

IMAGE/SQL very well to do this kind of capacity expansionmagic. Allegro was rumored to be deep inside the b-treeproject when HP released that database feature during the1990s.The initial version of the product description page is at

www.allegro.com/products/hp3000/bfree.html

Allegro extends usercount with BFree

Birket Fosteris not runningfor electionthis spring,

but he is campaigning for some new ideas.The founder of MB Foster, he’s stood onboth the homesteading and migrationavenues for more than six years — and ashe likes to point out, much longer whenyou consider moving data as a migration.This month the OpenMPE group which

Foster has chaired since its 2002 incep-tion goes into another election, looking forvolunteer help to get HP’s agreement onsource code licensing. But the scope ofFoster and his business reaches wellbeyond software, stepping into services ina big enough way that it will soon over-take software at his company. That sayssomething about a supplier who’s beenselling 3000 solutions so long.With an election on hand and services

heating up, we figured Birket — one ofthose community members known best byhis first name — would have something tosay about the new 3000 opportunities andpersistent challenges. We talked to him inthe week before February’s election, onhis cell while he traveled to a customer.

Some in the 3000 community are won-dering why, more than five years intothe Transition Era, OpenMPE is havinganother election of its board. Can yourvolunteers make a difference, so longafter HP sparked customers tomigrate?Our work for now is to make HP realize

there is going to be a presence of peoplewho will be there, after HP leaves.

Are there enough members inOpenMPE for HP to consider puttingMPE into the hands of the community?HP will never put MPE in the hands of

the community. They will only put it in thehands of someone who will be qualified tomanage and maintain the source code —which is the whole purpose of OpenMPE,becoming that group.

Is there any chance of HP selectingOpenMPE as that group?Absolutely. We’ve talked about doing a

mini-project up front, like soon just toprove ourselves, so HP gets a fire drill onwhat it’s like to do a patch without peopleinternal to HP. And they haven’t done apatch in the last little bit, right?

So what does a mini-project look like?

Oh, you’d find something that needs tobe changed, you’d make a specification,and you’d sit with a contractor and saywhat you need them to do. There’s no rea-son why OpenMPE can’t be those guys.The talent that has put their names for-ward to be part of the group to do devel-opment is rock-solid.

So the OpenMPE mission will certainlyconsist of services. The 3000 commu-nity’s market seems to be turningtoward services now, especially fromthe well-known vendors which the cus-tomers rely upon. What’s MB Fosterdoing today to expand services in addi-tion to its product support and migra-tion expertise?

For some 3000 sites we already providesome services in the area of our special-ties, which are dealing with data. We haveassisted customers in recruiting peoplefor full-time employment for multi-yearcontracts in the HP 3000 space —because those people needed staff, anddidn’t know where to find them.

This location service costs somethingfor a customer?It’s a courtesy for the customers. It

helps them out, and they like us, they buyour products, and they get other servicesfrom us. In some cases, we’re hostingtheir data marts, because we do this everyday. It’s a lot easier on the customer whenthey can rely on a data mart team that’sworking on a bunch of sites, knows thetools inside out and helped develop them.Most of those are on Windows or HP-UX.

Hosting in this case means having aserver running so the customer doesn’tneed to run one, or keep staff busy?

That’s correct. In the long run, hosting isgoing to be a very important part of howsmall- and medium-sized business anddepartmental computing gets done. That’sbecause the cost for staff these days isfive skill sets, although you might findthem in as few as three people. Thatmeans your staffing cost is going to be$300,000 to $800,000 in order to get theright people involved. That’s quite a bit ofmoney, so a lot of divisions would ratherbuy part of someone’s time, knowing thatperson is an expert and will do exactlywhat’s needed.

This kind of expertise, is it beginningto leave the industry?Retirement is an issue, both the retire-

ment of end-user experts as well as thetechnical experts. The end-user experts areas important, or even more important,than the technicians. Once the applicationis running, so long as someone can followthe script for daily, weekly and monthlyprocesses, it’s not a big deal. But whenthey go in and lose an end-user, it takesawhile to train a new one. Many timeswhat that end user who’s been there a longtime hasn’t been written down anywhere.

By end-user expert, you mean someonewho’s well-versed in how to run an in-house application?Not just in-house, but any application

that runs the business. Take a look atwhat’s happened to MANMAN. It’s changedhands four times, from ASK to ComputerAssociates to SSA GT, and now it’s gone toInfor. It’s had multiple owners and definitechanges in the way that things are sup-ported and maintained.MANMAN is a pretty big manufacturing

application for the 3000 community.People are still running it, although not asmany as there were, but a lot of them. Thechallenge with knowing how many is thatsome of those customers are a division ofa larger company — and that larger com-pany doesn’t share the IT plan down to thedivision level anymore.

What about the 3000 site which needsto replace an app, rather than adopt acorporate system?We’ve been on many sites where we’ve

helped customers through the softwareselection process. We look at what kind ofitems would be mandatory, then nice-to-haves, and build a matrix across softwarechoices so they can compare apples toapples.


Birket Foster

Landing new ideas and new paths for 3000s

Birket FosterChairmanMB Foster


Does your company, as a Platinum Migration partner, givethe community some of what you know and have learned?We certainly help coach people through things, especially

through our series of seminars and Webinars. Our basic criteriathese days is to make sure the business side is involved. Youhave to have someone from the senior management team whocan okay a budget. To give you an example of costs, in the smalland medium businesses they think it’s $13,000 a seat all in. Ifyou have 50 people, that racks up pretty quick.You have to end up talking to senior management because

there’s a business fit as well as an IT fit. In the absence of that,you’re just grading things against what IT thinks they should be.Frankly, the application runs the business, and IT just providesthe wheels underneath it.

How many migrating sites consider the share of budgetthat Windows requires?There are lots of people who have never managed where they

spend their money. There is some consciousness-raising goingon. There’s also the possibility that the senior managementteam doesn’t understand what their investment in IT should be.So we’ve been doing some work in the area of application

portfolio management, so people can understand how a portfo-lio of applications that run a company can be evaluated. So peo-ple can understand how to plan their investments in IT.

How busy is your migration service staff today? In the pastthe Platinum partners had expertise still on the bench.Now they’re all actively working here, and in fact we’re hiring

additional members into the team. Everybody’s busy, and we’reprobably running a dozen migrations.

Does your hiring extend to people with 3000 expertise?It’s more likely to be domain expertise, where somebody

knows the healthcare industry or they know the manufacturingindustry well. That’s more important than specific applicationknowledge on an HP 3000. Unless they’re the person chosen tohold the fort while everybody else goes off and starts up thenew application.In a case of someone who could look after an application and

make sure that it ran smoothly, so it would free up the currentstaff so they could work on the new app, that might be a situa-tion where we would hire someone on the 3000 side.For a large part of this, the application is being replaced by

something off the shelf. So quite frankly, the 3000 skill setsaren’t going to help. Things like understanding COBOL and howto compile it, FORTRAN, Pascal and C++, all of those thingsmight be handy.

Replacement projects like that sometimes have to hurdlethe use of very specific HP 3000 software, right?Yes, there are tools that have been used in the HP 3000 envi-

ronment in creative ways. The trouble with having somebodyMacGyver something is that it’s really hard to find the equiva-lent in a new environment. Part of the process is always to sur-vey how people used what third party tools, what they wereusing, what did they write themselves — and then understandhow the entire environment works with the entire corporation.And perhaps with trading partners on the supply side and thedemand side.

Do you sometimes have to encourage training in a newsolution to get those MacGyver-isms replaced?In some cases they have no idea what it actually does. The

problem is that the guy who wrote it is long gone. The currentfolks don’t know what’s there, or why it’s there. They just praythat it keeps running.

You’re one of the most prolific presenters at HP 3000 con-ferences and industry meetings. Would it be fair to saythat the overall message of these presentations is “Theremay be many points to consider which you’re not yet awareof?”We’ve been helping people move data since 1985. We’ve been

in this business a very long time, and it only got formalized sixyears ago. We’ve learned a ton of stuff along the way for thingsthat are going to bite people. It’s called wisdom, and wisdomcomes from experience — and experience can come from doingit wrong once.

Is your business starting to trend toward services beingthe larger part of what you do for the community?I think migrations, and the sale of migration tools which do

include some of our own software tools, will be a bigger part ofthe business this year than they have been in the past. I expectthey will cross the line and become the larger part of the busi-ness.People are starting to recognize in their own organizations

that the ability to support an application, do any major modifi-cations, all of those things are becoming more difficult. The cus-tomers are doing an evaluation to see if their application opera-tions are sustainable. “How will we train the next person?”When people start asking those kinds of questions, they’re quitesurprised sometimes. Like finding spreadsheets which run adepartment, but have nothing to do with an IT department, butprobably should have.The informal stuff is what you need to find in your organiza-

tion, these rogue applications. When we’re engaged to workwith a customer, there is a mandate to understand the depart-mental applications and operations.

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I can’t imagine a world where the Web doesn’t play a big role insuccess. But as IT pros, you know better than to believe any com-puting tool always delivers as expected. Downtime, mistakendesign; these life lessons become experience and then wisdom.Somehow the Internet seems to escape this skepticism, since itconnects us in innovative ways. We’re count on the Web like gravi-ty, government forms, and mergers which make organizations larg-er. Smaller is supposed to be weaker, in that last model.While I write this in mid-February, a few bigger-is-better

alliances are in play. Microsoft made a $44 billion bid for Yahoo, adeal nearly double the size of the HP-Compaq merger of 2002. HPCEO Carly Fiorina battled an angry, nearly equal share of stock-holders to push through her merger. It looks like Yahoo might pushback with as much force, saying the record offer is undervalued foran information content provider.Much has been made about this deal being a way for Microsoft

to keep up with Google. A few years ago Yahoo was compared toGoogle in the pages of Wired, longbefore Google was trading above $500.The merger tussle reminds me of the

days when HP was working to adoptCompaq, a company which had fallenfrom its heyday as Yahoo has now. Atleast Fiorina had Compaq’s board inher pocket when HP did its big grab. It took Fiorina’s CEO firing and more

than three years to make the HP pur-chase “a good earner,” as they say inthe wiseguy movies. I wonder whatMicrosoft will need to succeed.Mergers can be delicate operations,attempts to embrace each other whichthe Web is expected to enable. Encompass and its two new part-ners, Interex Europe and the ITUG group, see the Web’s social net-working tools as a way to attract younger members. The newEndeavor group wants to create community instead of an associa-tion. The latter sounds aged, while the former sounds fun.One Encompass director pointed out that the merger of corpora-

tions is very different from mak-ing allies out of user groups.Chris Koppe talked of mergers“being one of those thingswhere somebody decides to buysomebody else. User groupsdon’t come together as quickly,

but I think this [association] is getting close to where we want tobe. Individually it was very hard to get HP’s attention, and thatmodel now changes going forward.”Being big is within reach when you can stretch across the Wide

World of the Web. Using the Web as a lever to connect can deliverbenefits, especially if you can be in the business of delivering thehard to find. That’s the Long Tail theory that’s made Amazon andNetflix work. Neither claims to be the biggest. But they succeed byspecialization. Specialization, plus the Web, has let the NewsWireconnect with your community. Perhaps social contact through theWeb will let user groups, maybe Microsoft, grab you by the tail.


Ron Seybold, Editor

Spring 2008 Blog-only articles(Read these on our blog’s category pages)

Homesteading

Old habit protects from new risks 2/6/08What is your 3000’s retirement plan? 2/5/08The best don’t get hacked 1/28/08Mission-critical, disaster-ready, in big places 1/10/08Mine those reports and data for value 1/3/08Help define your story’s resolutions 1/2/08A holiday gift list to wish for 12/21/07Questions good, no matter how late they’re asked 12/14/07Is Forever 20 more years? 11/8/07Binary patches: third party support today 11/6/07

Migration

New slim solutions from HP 1/24/08Do 3000 people score 5 on openness? 1/17/08Be exhaustive and Eloquent in show choices 1/15/08Off to look at another Unix 1/14/08Scoop up an array of migration savvy 1/7/08Using a migration general contractor’s blueprint 1/8/08The migration stakes fly high at WestJet 1/4/08A Unix feature to move you 12/4/07Horsepower for new Windows steeds 11/13/07

Web Resources

Bay Area 3000 education, now online 2/4/08PDF news for perusal, or pursuing the past 12/20/07No bad questions, no matter how late 12/12/07Still hiring after all these years 12/7/07

News Outta HP

The best CEO money can buy 1/31/08Learning about missed opportunity 1/11/08Open source technology, or products: choose 1/9/08Love is the hardest, best gift of all 12/24/07HP liberates some 3000 patches 12/17/07HP predicts declining growth 12/13/07Webcast shows off 10 gigabit Ethernet 12/11/07HP releases SCSI Pass-Through, to some 12/10/07HP shares open source porting tips 12/5/07HP revenue growth shatters quarterly marks 11/20/07

Newsmakers

One important job OpenMPE can do 1/29/08Leadership for the community 1/23/08Small support shops fill big shoes 1/18/08The Very Top Stories of 2007 12/31/07Top 2007 Stories, Part 3 12/28/07Top 2007 Stories, Part 2 12/27/07Top 2007 Stories, Part 1 12/26/07Vegas date to save for ’08 12/19/07What was done in 1990 12/3/07Why we were there, and are still here 11/30/07Encompass board returns single 3000 member 11/9/07

Podcasts

New Endeavor hopes to create community 2/8/08

Issue, Feb 08

Documents

Transcript of Issue, Feb 08