10,000 users will access HP-UX replacement system by next year

A team of four vendors has been helping 40 IT staffers at the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges wean itself off 34 HP 3000s around the state. After the first year of planning and work, the principal delivery of millions of lines of migrated application code has been accepted. The vision of moving a three-decade HP 3000 customer, a plan first conceived in 2003, is becoming real enough to test with users on the college campuses. SBCTC now goes into user test mode for the next six months or so before it starts to power down the major 3000 applications that have supported higher education in the state since the 1980s. Bob Adams, director of the SBCTC’s Portfolio and Project Management Office, has been managing HP 3000s since the start of that decade. He’s now leading the group’s efforts to move away from hardware HP will stop supporting in

OpenMPE Invent resource revives

source serverOriginal MPE source code 3000 now delivers development tools

This month at the datacenter of the Support Group, a legendary resource was up and running once more. TSG has volunteered its datacenter as the host for the official Invent3k public access development server, something HP

hosted for the community until the end of 2008. For close to two

years Invent3k was dark, but starting this month the primary host burns with a light that may seem everlasting. The server that’s up and running, with a fresh master password,

came from HP’s labs by way of a Client Systems

3000 contribution. This Series 959 4-way arrived with

HP’s name for it labeled on the rear access panel. The yellow sticker reads MPESOURC. Those eight letters — it’s an MPE system, after all, and is so limited to those characters — help to prove, in addition to a report from Client Systems’ Dan Cossey, that this was the MPE source code machine at HP. Those millions of lines of code have been wiped off the 54GB of SureStore disk arrays attached to MPESOURC. HP shipped out major parts of that code to eight licensees this year, an accomplishment that OpenMPE takes a reasonable share of credit for sparking. But the whole MPE/iX enchilada once coursed through the same PA-RISC processors and memory which just started serving OpenMPE and its members. Another part of the group’s news is an affordable offer to use Invent3k during 2011 and beyond. Chairman Birket Foster used about 20 minutes of the recent CAMUS user group meeting to update the OpenMPE membership offerings. Invent3k will be the first asset to generate money for the group, but access won’t cost much more than the free trial membership of 2010. In 2011 a $99 per year fee will get users access to working with Invent3k. (A DR version of the system runs at Measurement Specialties’ 3000 shop,

Ex-SAP chief takes reins in first HP hire from Euro executive ranks

HP chose little-known executive Leo Apotheker as its seventh CEO this fall, confounding analysts who expected an in-house candidate to take the job. But while Apotheker spent his first week far away from HP headquarters, his “listening tour” might have picked up the sounds of HP’s enterprise marketing roaring. The message from the new HP Instant-On Enterprise is being barked at a pitch better suited for the big dogs of the IT world: airlines, worldwide delivery services, or multinationals. These sectors were the examples of

how an integrated solution for business and government helps enterprises tun on new ways to serve customers and citizens. Citizens are being served today by

HP 3000s, but Instant-On offers new ways. “The best mix of traditional, private and public cloud environments” is being called HP Hybrid Delivery. Then there’s Application Transformation (think legacy modernization

for 3000s), Enterprise Security, and Information Optimization. The 57-year-old Apotheker is HP’s first top executive to come from a European

See Invent3k, page 10

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See Washington, page 8

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HP plucks a surprise CEO with overseas pedigree

34 Washington colleges take delivery of migration code

Independent HP 3000 Information November 2010

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How to contact the 3000 NewsWire

Contents November 2010

ISSN 1521-124XThe 3000 NewsWire is published four times yearly, plus electronic updates, by 3000 NewsWire LLC. Contents of this publication may not be reproduced in any form without express permission of the publisher. Non-bylined articles are written by the editor. Publisher believes all information printed here to be true, but cannot assume responsibility for errors. © 3000 NewsWire LLC. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

HP plucks a surprise CEO with overseas pedigree — After a six-week search, ex-SAP chief takes the CEO reins in the first HP hire from Euro executive ranks — 134 Washington colleges take delivery of migration code — 10,000 users will access an HP-UX replacement system by next year in four-vendor project — 1OpenMPE Invent resource revives source server — Original MPE source code 3000 now delivers development tools and training system for homesteaders — 1HP ends free patch policy — Support contracts now required for UX, MPE/iX — 6Ways to Boost the HP 3000’s Effectiveness, By David Greer — Version control via Windows, data cleanup, data marts can help 3000 sites get best use — 14HP gives away blade servers to sell HP-UX — A limited time offer gives a c7000 and blade server for free in exchange for buying a UX license and HP support — 15Vladimir spreads news for 2011 to 3000 sites — VEsoft’s co-founder continues his tour of customers’ sites to train and educate companies moving into 2011 — 16Eloquence adds 64-bit Win, UX improvements — Newest version of the data-base most like IMAGE supports Microsoft’s most preferred data environment — 17NonStop note flows from HP 3000’s eliminator — Near the anniversary of his shutdown edict, former 3000 GM Prather touts futures with a tried message — 17Independent support plumbs 3000 internals — Support firms can configure sys-tems on par with HP’s software, using legal back door designs of PA-RISC — 183000 support firms still competing with HP — Despite HP’s “end of life” dead-line, the vendor still bids against independent firms for select 2011 contracts — 19Q&A: Steve Davidek, Warming to Sparks of Change at a City in Transition — A 3000 manager and future Connect president evolves his shop to newer tech— 20Top 10 insurance firm begins migration work — Speedware will launch a proj-ect for a Fortune 100 customer which is only starting its migration off 3000s — 21

The Wide World of the Web — 22

EditorRon Seybold (editor@3000newswire.com)

PublisherAbby Lentz (subs@3000newswire.com)

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

News blog with business-day reports: 3000newswire.com/blog Archived news & tech articles: 3000newswire.com/search.html Voicemail, alternate e-mail: 512.331.0075; rseybold@sbcglobal.netDeliveries & mail: 11702 Buckingham Road, Austin, TX 78759

News feed flows with things you wouldn’t expect

Among the things that make life interesting are those things you never expected. After 15 years of publishing the 3000 NewsWire (thanks for your support) Abby and I took a 20th anniversary vacation to sunny California. Starting with afternoon highs in the 90s in Yosemite Valley, the trip and this fall broiled with such unexpected events. These are the things that keep a couple reaching out together, as well as events that should keep you reading for many years to come. Some occur as “I never would’ve expected that,” and others drift into “who knows how long it will be before I see that?” Surprise enriches any story, whether it’s a tale of travels, the innocent drama of sports, or an IT career around a computer no longer made or sold, and soon, not supported by some. A gourmet lunch at a gas station: This one is attached to that Yosemite vacation above. Abby and I lounged in the luxury of the Ahwhanee Hotel in Yosemite’s valley, but we also took a day-trip across the highest road pass in California, descending to the shores of Mono Lake. Aside from the three-times-saltier than the ocean lake waters, the unexpected was fabulous fish tacos and buffalo meatloaf at the Tioga Mobil gas station on the lakeshore. I’ve had food as good at a four-star eatery — and it wasn’t that tasty because we’d just come down off a 9,900-foot mountain summit. A Fortune 100 migration starting in 2010: Speedware announced that one of the world’s top 10 insurance firms is only now starting its move off the HP 3000. The company, which doesn’t want to be named, has a profile of the customer most likely to be long-ago migrated. Such companies have lots of IT money, but as Speedware put it, the insurers believed “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” You might continue to be surprised at who’s still in the un-migrated roll call next year. Baseball in Texas in November: This one falls under the heading of sports dream come true for me. A baseball team I’ve supported since marrying Abby finally played in a World Series in this state. The Rangers were not even favored

See Unexpected, page 4

3The 3000 NewsWire • November 2010 • 3000newswire.com/blog

to win their division at the season’s start. After 49 seasons without even a try at the Series, they rolled over the two playoff teams with the top records over the season, even if the Rangers then fell in a swift World Series that silenced Texas sluggers. No matter; they won the only Series game in the history of Texas Major League Baseball. “We’ll always have this season,” said my pal Tom and I, as we attended games wearing Ranger red and wide smiles, even richer for the surprise of the long-dreamt-of Series. HP gives away servers to sell Unix: Falls under the heading of “who knows how long” until this one, but there’s a

deal to give away $12,000 of hardware if you’ll just buy an HP-UX license and support to get started. The new CEO Leo Apotheker is expected to boost HP’s software business, but I didn’t think this freebie would emerge so quickly. Not that HP-UX needs the new customers, of course. But we hear that Sun’s got a new hardware sales guy who knows HP’s Unix vulnerabilities. (More on that in a bit.) Elephant seal rookery and drugstore ducks in Cambria: If that sounds like an epic poem title, the afternoon of our last full day of that vacation looked like an epic nature safari. This little village halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles boasts a drugstore with the world’s biggest collection of themed floating toy ducks — something that a couple floating in their 50s and 60s, with

two new grandkids, could scarcely resist buying out. Add in the only active rookery of elephant seals, endangered, majestic and playful, right up the road on a protected beach, and our choice of B&B became a revelation of a destination. We had no idea of either bonus treasure. Ex-HP CEO selling against HP weeks after ouster: This one took even HP’s lawyers by surprise, and they’re an anxious bunch of anticipators. Mark Hurd got himself fired by HP on Aug. 6, then hired up by HP competitor Oracle — Sun’s new owner — on Sept. 7. Right, just one day after the deadline for HP to withdraw a $12 million golden parachute from Hurd. Sun’s now got a new sales leader to barracuda-bite HP’s sagging Unix business. Hurd becomes the first ex-CEO to retire to something other than winemaking, writing or politics. HP got back $16 million in stock options, but will lose a lot more in Unix sales to this fellow embracing Larry Ellison’s barracuda behavior, after B-actress-bouncing during the year before. Fresh CEO dodges subpoena in first week at HP: After a search which took the board more than six weeks to skip over in-house replacements for Hurd, Hewlett-Packard refused to accept a court subpoena for its new CEO. Leo Apotheker was a surprise to nearly everyone in the world to take over the planet’s largest computer company. But so little diligence was done that HP couldn’t see an Oracle lawsuit scheduled over damages from Apotheker’s last CEO stop, SAP. “Where in the world is Leo Apotheker?” the wags joked in his first week, with sightings around HP offices well outside the venue of Oracle’s suit. (We’d pause here to add that HP boardroom scruples don’t really surprise us any longer, but that would be undercutting the surprise — which is really that HP can’t seem to hire for its top spot from inside anymore. Never knew we’d miss Lew Platt, rest in peace.) NewsWire enters 16th year: I write this on the very day the community marks HP’s sayonara to sales and support of the server, Nov. 14, 2001. It’s been nine years since that day, 50 percent longer than our publication period pre-HP-exit. We never expected this to be a 15-year ride back in 1995, but much longer odds were given for our extra nine years after 2001. Our readers have been cautious, patient and still proceed at a pace we predicted when the last decade was new. As we pass into 2011, we expect more unexpected stories. It’s a good reason, as with any saga, to keep turning the pages.

— Ron Seybold

4

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Unexpected

The 3000 NewsWire • November 2010 • 3000newswire.com/blog

pedigree, and he came as a surprise and disappointed some analysts who hoped for an HP insider to finally assume the CEO post. A Nov. 22 press conference on his company’s Q4 results is likely to be Apotheker’s first contact with such analysts or the business press. In the meantime, he’s traveled to meet with customers on his worldwide tour this month, a trip that serves to keep the new CEO out the grasp of a subpoena. Oracle wanted HP’s new leader on the stand in a lawsuit Oracle pressed to win billions of dollars from SAP. An SAP company stole Oracle programming and products, and Oracle would like to prove Apotheker was involved. He killed off that alliance not long after he took the reins at SAP. Instant-On is targeted to compete with Oracle as well as IBM. It’s a new way of trying to tie HP hardware, software and services business into a bundle for the big customer which these firms battle for. Unlike court testimony under oath, Instant-On is at the other end of the new CEO’s communication tasks. His job is to push a plan that leads to HP managed services and cloud computing. But at the moment the CEO’s message will only be scaled to the kinds of customers an HP leader would hear in person. That’s not the City of Sparks (serving citizens) or maybe not even the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (modernizing and migrating IT that serves 100,000 students and 10,000 users of its 34 HP 3000s.)

Not an instant choice It took six weeks of search for HP to choose an outsider for its CEO post. Apotheker started working in the fresh HP fiscal year Nov. 1, almost two months after HP got rid of Mark Hurd. A few articles have referred to the SAP lifer as wearing a name that translates in German to “pharmacist.” But their prescriptions for him to heal the HP Way have been ill-administered at best. Analysts have puzzled about why Apotheker was picked over HP’s own “deep executive bench,” to use the phrase HP offered while it was firing Mark Hurd. One member of that bench recognized by the 3000 community, Ann Livermore, was passed over for the third time in about a decade. Livermore leads the HP operations which control the

6 The 3000 NewsWire • November 2010 • 3000newswire.com/blog

CEO Surprise(Continued from page 1)

See CEO Surprise, page 10

Support contracts now required

Hewlett-Packard has ended a policy with decades of history for its enterprise computing users: The ability for anyone to download any patch for systems such as HP 3000s, HP-UX servers and other business critical systems. Free patches were no longer available from HP’s enterprise ecosystem after Sept. 17. HP announced a pay-only patch policy “for Enterprise Servers, Storage, and Networking product lines. Products affected include Integrity servers, HP-UX, OpenVMS, Tru64 and any other products for which patches are available.” HP’s IT Response Center website now requires a current HP support contract to download HP’s repairs and enhancements. The HP 3000 has no support contract option available from HP starting Jan. 1, so HP plans to make the system’s owners deal with HP on a patch by patch basis. HP’s been using the Time & Materials prices to make limited support services available starting next year. HP officials contacted for our story failed to comment on how the change affects users of the server that HP drops support for 2011. An FAQ web page on the policy mentions the HP 3000 in specific, but fails to offer detail on contracts. “Q. What happened to patches for OS releases which are no longer supported (MPE, HP-UX 10.x, etc)? A: Patches for unsupported OSes are no longer offered via FTP. Contact HP support for assistance (charges may apply).” Few customers who’ve weighed in on the change have been surprised at HP’s intentions, but many don’t see this as any good for a 3000 community just learning of the new patch practices. Independent support companies blasted the change. “This is not good,” said Allegro Consultants president Steve Cooper, whose company supports HP 3000, HP-UX and Sun enterprise users, among others. “They are following Oracle’s moves now, trying to put all third-party maintenance companies out of business.” Cooper noted earlier this year that Oracle had turned the patch and software pricing model upside down, making the Sun Solaris environment free, but turning all patches into a paid-only commodity. HP explains its pricing change from all-free to all-paid by saying that it’s moving to industry-standard practices. “This change brings HP in alignment

with accepted industry practices for software patch delivery and ensures entitled customers and partners are provided with the most current software patches for their IT environment,” and HP statement read. “In addition, standardizing on key patch availability services reduces structural cost and enables HP to provide better support on the standardized access points.” HP’s policies cover all of its Enterprise Storage, Server and Networking product lines, including the HP-UX Integrity systems and HP ProLiant servers. The ESS group was the only business sector which continued to post lower sales in the company’s latest quarterly report. However, the revenue of a support contract has typically gone to HP’s support division. HP 3000 customers complained to their vendor about this disbursement in the 1990s, when few HP 3000 problems generated any need for support expenditures, but the 3000 division had severe needs for enhancement and development funding. HP is ending all FTP download access for the patches while it starts payment for access through the HP ITRC. “Customers should check their existing support agreements to confirm they are covered, or they may obtain a valid support agreement with software update support,” it stated on the web page. An email to users who get HP’s critical and recommended patch notices says that “Patch access will be through the ITRC support portal. You need to have a valid ITRC user ID and password and will now also need an active HP support agreement that includes Software Updates linked to your ITRC profile to access Patch content and services. We urge you to review your current support coverage now to ensure you have valid coverage and can maintain uninterrupted access to Patch.” A software media update level of support — for the sites which can still order one for their server — appears to satisfy HP’s new need for support money. Valid support agreements must contain at least one of the following offers: •HPSoftwareUpdatesService •HPLicenseSubscriptionService •HPSWMediaandDocumentationUpdates Service HP hasn’t created a patch for the 3000 in two years, and the company shut down its HP 3000 development lab at the end of 2008.

HP ends free patch policy

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less than two months. The biggest risk that prompted the move off the 3000 was parts availability, according to Adams. Several of the colleges use the Series 9x7 generation of servers, for example, hardware which HP stopped building in the 1990s. Even while there were fewer parts available for these oldest 3000s at SBCTC, there was even less HP Unix experience on staff at the organization. Adams said the solution to embracing this new environment was to contract out support for HP-UX, learning it from lead migration contractor Speedware. “We’re in the process of mentoring our staff,” Adams said, “having them attend HP-UX training, and we contracted to hire someone very familiar with the HP-UX production environment.” While the colleges’ IT staff has been focusing its critical mass on the project, 3.7 million lines of code has been migrated by Speedware and its allied firms. MB Foster, ScreenJet and Marxmeier Software took significant roles in moving SBCTC away from a mix of Transact, Protos (a COBOL derivative), TurboIMAGE and older versions of Data Express reports. In place of each of these

technologies came TransAction (built by ScreenJet to run Transact on non-3000 platforms), Micro Focus COBOL, the Eloquence database and MB Foster’s UDA Link reports — the last re-engineered by the vendor in a new version to run Data Express reports on the latest HP Integrity servers. Adams said that 50,000 of the reports run across the 34 campuses, multiple instances of similar reports customized for each college. More than 1,450 programs have passed testing by SBCTC, and the project is on schedule for complete implementation by May of next year. SBCTC is moving swiftly to the point of testing because it already had 9,000 test instances created prior to starting the migration. IT staff had prepared the cases for a previous project which the colleges decided to restart. A new strategy was among the fundamental changes between migration efforts, Adams said. “If the project is well-conceived to begin with, it has a good chance of being successful,” he said. “If you have the right team of people, if you have the right vendor, it will be successful.” Getting too ambitious in a first attempt will prevent that migration success. “It’s got to be basic, simple, understandable,” Adams said. “Risks have to be determined and be realistic. Project

management is common sense.” The colleges’ IT group will be converting 600 fundamental Data Express reports among its project tasks. 180 were converted as of October.

Recreating success Speedware has taken the lead on management of the project since the September 2009 inception. The vendor promotes a “lift and shift” approach for many of its projects that move complex 3000-based systems to newer hardware. Sometimes that means recreating tools and technology that wasn’t broken on MPE/iX, just hosted on a platform the customer wants to leave. ScreenJet’s TransAction, as well as its EZV screen generation tool, are two prime examples of this kind of recreation. While exploring the programming behind hundreds of application user interfaces, ScreenJet’s Alan Yeo documented VPlus anomalies and bugs in the UI. To keep the coding straightforward and the project basic, the EZV replacement for VPlus recreates all of the known and discovered UI behaviors. “We had to find out what’s going on” in the VPlus interface, Yeo explained, “and then we have to replicate the bugs and the undocumented features, because we don’t know for certain how many times they’re being used.” A system with thousands of programs, using tens of thousands of reports across more than 30 servers is simply too complex to succeed at anything but this lift and shift strategy. The key is to put all the pieces back in their places on a new platform, so an interface behaves exactly as it did on the HP 3000. 3000 tools such as Transact or VPlus “rely on these things happening and the data being cleaned up,” Yeo said. “The only thing you can do is replicate what happens.” Our objective is that you should never have to read the application code” to enable a migration. The heavy code lifting for TransAction was done by a ScreenJet team led by Dave Dummer, the original author of Transact. Yeo said his work on the project and EZV taught him a great deal about the number of bugs in VPlus. “The stuff we have found this year has been unbelievable.” EZV now accounts for all that ScreenJet discovered and documented during the project.

Packaging for migration Speedware’s senior project manager Dedem Chatalolu said the migration moved quickly because the SBCTC staff

8

Washington(Continued from page 1)

The 3000 NewsWire • November 2010 • 3000newswire.com/blog

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managed by OpenMPE secretary and system manager Tracy Johnson.) “You’ll have an Invent3k box where you can log on and develop and test things,” Foster said of the system maintained by TSG’s David Floyd and Johnson. “You can use it to train, so in your succession plan you can show a person how to log on and manage an HP 3000, without

affecting your own production machine,” he offered as an example. Invent3k is fully patched up on the 7.5 level of MPE/iX.

OpenMPE’s has a link to its PayPal account posted up at its website to collect these $99 memberships. Before too long the user-built utilities of the Contributed Software Library, just arrived at the TSG datacenter this week, will also be online. The hardware may be legacy-grade, and the software will remain stable and static. But those are benefits of working with a solution handed down from its creators to curators, in order to extend the use of the 3000 for the community.

Gnu Tools go online The DR version of Invent3k has gained new set of tools, another improvement set up by Johnson. After being offline for close to two years, the development server is now expanding beyond the original Invent3k capabilities. Johnson reported that “Mark Klein’s GNU tools have now been installed,” open source programs such as gzip/bzip, autoconf and more. Klein was the founder of the 3000’s open source feast back in the 1990s, when he ported the GNU C Compiler to MPE/iX — opening the door for ports and development of every other utility and program such as Apache Web services, Samba print services, and those GNU programs OpenMPE announced. Invent3k2 is free to use through the rest of 2010. The HP 3000 is online at 98.190.245.141, and a terminal window will get you an INVENT3K2: prompt. You’ll need an account, which Johnson can provide once you’re a member of OpenMPE. That’s free, too, until 2011. Users sign up for their free OpenMPE membership by following instructions at the bottom of the OpenMPE membership web page. Johnson pointed out that “being a member of the OpenMPE list-server and a subscriber to the OpenMPE membership roll are not the same.”

10 The 3000 NewsWire • November 2010 • 3000newswire.com/blog

Invent3k(Continued from page 1)

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The revival of Invent3k2 represents work of the community reclaiming what HP shuttered during 2008. The Jazz server at HP’s labs went offline along with Invent3k, and Jazz had some utilities for the 3000 that didn’t make the transition to the independent versions brought online by Speedware and Client Systems. In addition to the toolset that open source developers use, Invent3k2 also has been set up with all the HP 3000 software from the vendor: BASIC, C, COBOL II, FORTRAN, Pascal, RPG, SPL and Java/iX. The intention of Invent3k has never been to allow these HP programs to be downloaded; the open source programs as well are meant to be run from this HP 3000. Accounts that are free until Dec. 31 are meant for OpenMPE members to compile and test their own programs.

fate of HP’s servers and software for enterprise customers. Livermore likely has little interest in leading all of HP, a company which has mutated mightily from the business where she cut her teeth selling HP’s support products such as LaserROM. Analysts guessed at an HP area where Apotheker will try to reform the HP Way: software. It’s a tall order for a company with a spotty history of acquiring and creating software, but if he achieves that, it will increase support by extension. Customers can expect his continued pressure on the support business, where HP just raised its prices to increase the cost of owing an HP enterprise server. This is what you do when your innovation sags: boost the price you charge to remain a customer of a complex product. HP already opened the door for this impact with a paid-only patch policy. Apotheker worked to raise such costs while leading SAP. Customers revolted and price hikes were pushed back. That resistance against higher costs will be tougher to mount against a company the size of HP, where thousands of products across many operating units will be probed for profit increases. Support revenues are the most lucrative HP operations, other than lawsuit-driven licensing challenges. These revenues are also the final product an enterprise customer like the 3000 user is likely to purchase before dropping HP.

CEO Surprise(Continued from page 6)

packed up its application code adeptly. “We were able to walk them through the process of how to package the code, group the executables together so we could deliver things back to them in phases,” she said. “They really helped and supported us in that.” She added that the 9,000 test cases from the colleges helped Speedware test its migration code work. Chatalolu pointed to ScreenJet’s product TransAction, which after refinements made it possible to run that code on non-MPE systems, as essential to the success so far. ScreenJet leveraged a fresh version of TransAction under intense deadline pressures. “There were some crunch times along the way where we really needed to double down,” said Speedware’s marketing director Chris Koppe, “to hit the targets on time.” One essential element of the migration was already fine-tuned: Marxmeier’s Eloquence database, replacing TurboIMAGE. “It was nice was going to the Eloquence database, which has enabled us to take TurboIMAGE databases

and port them over with very little work,” Adams said. As the migrated code arrives in the IT group for testing, Adams credited MB Foster for making the crucial Data Express reports a carry-forward tool for the colleges. “They retrofitted their product so the existing catalogs and reports work with their new UDA Link product,” he said. Each college runs 1,000 to 2,000 versions of the fundamental reports.

Another third party solution which moved from the 3000 to the Unix environment was Hillary Software’s byRequest e-forms and PDF report solution. The software is used by the colleges in varying processes/ “It’s been pretty transparent,” Adams said of the tool that’s been serving the colleges since 1999. Hillary engineered byRequest to work with a bedrock technical solution, Speedware’s AMXW environment emulation tool. AMXW takes the place of SBCTC’s home-grown job

scheduler, for example. But some 3000-specific pieces remain to be replaced. Adams said that the Dictionary/3000 data repository feeds the colleges’ reports. “We didn’t actually replace Dictionary/3000 yet,” Adams said. “[UDA Link] still uses that database to get its file and database structures. The question of maintaining Dictionary/3000 has come up a few times, however, and we are looking into that with Speedware.” Speedware’s Chatalolu said that they had five full-time staffers at one point dedicated to the Transact work of the project. The migration vendor said it’s been able to apply resources as needed to accomplish the code migration within schedule. Sometimes a customer’s code syntax is modified to adapt to target technology, Koppe said; a 3000 COBOL to Micro Focus COBOL project works this way. However, in any migration which uses legacy tech as extensively as at SBCTC, the tools must be modified to transition the apps. “ScreenJet’s team worked to make their product 100 percent compatible with the customer’s code,” Koppe said. “The onus was on ScreenJet, to make the product work flawlessly. That makes these cycles a bit longer than patching up code here.”

Transition redux, sans servers About 100,000 students attend the SBCTC colleges, and 25,000 employees work in the system, Adams said. “Scale-wise, this is huge. It’s in the billions of dollars that we are processing.” The work that Speedware, its partners and the college IT staff is doing will move the organization onto HP-UX next year, Adams expects. But he only sees some parts of the shifted solutions as having a 5-7-year lifespan before they move again, probably to a managed services platform: the cloud. Speedware had to work within the colleges’ budget throughout a project that saw a 20 percent cut in overall expenditures. All of the SBCTC servers are now relocated into a central datacenter where the HP Integrity server will do the work begun in 1982 by HP 3000s. But a hosted ERP setup without servers onsite is the ultimate goal, in Adams’ view. “The bottom line is that this project was our last chance to get this thing done right,” he said. “We weren’t going to change technologies. All we wanted to do was extend what we have.”

12 The 3000 NewsWire • November 2010 • 3000newswire.com/blog

Washington(Continued from page 8)

VPlus Migration Check List VPlus EZVVCLOSEFORMF ☑ ☑VCLOSETERM ☑ ☑VERRMSG ☑ ☑VFIELDEDITS ☑ ☑VFINISHFORM ☑ ☑VGETBUFFER ☑ ☑VGETKEYLABELS ☑ ☑VGETNEXTFORM ☑ ☑VINITFORM ☑ ☑VOPENFORMF ☑ ☑VOPENTERM ☑ ☑VPUTBUFFER ☑ ☑VPUTFIELD ☑ ☑VPUTWINDOW ☑ ☑VREADFIELDS ☑ ☑VSETERROR ☑ ☑VSETKEYLABELS ☑ ☑VSHOWFORM ☑ ☑VSETKEYLABEL ☑ ☑VPLACECURSOR ☑ ☑VTURNOFF ☑ ☑VTURNON ☑ ☑VCHANGEFIELD ☑ ☑VGETFIELD ☑ ☑VPUTSAVEFIELD ☑ ☑VGETSAVEFIELD ☑ ☑VGETFIELDINFO ☑ ☑VGETtype ☑ ☑VPUTtype ☑ ☑VPRINTFORM ☑ ☑VPRINTSCREEN ☑ ☑VGETYYYYMMDD ☑ ☑VPUTYYYYMMDD ☑ ☑VBLOCKREAD ☑ ☑VBLOCKWRITE ☑ ☑VGETFORMINFO ☑ ☑VGETFILEINFO ☑ ☑VGETARBINFO ☑ ☑VGETLANG ☑ ☑VARMSCP * ☑ ☑VGETSCPDATA * ☑ ☑VGETSCPFIELD * ☑ ☑ * only supported via DTC

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the image above represents a few hundred thousand lines of code, 100+ man-years VPlus experience, and over a decade doing screen migrations and conversions. EZV is ScreenJet’s third-generation VPlus toolset, and with it we have gone back to first principles that on a migration “lift and shift is best”. The User Interface is the main part of an application your users interact with. Whilst retraining a few users as part of a migration may not be a problem, changing the UI and having to retrain dozens, hundreds, or possibly thousands of remote users can introduce a level of risk and cost that can rapidly exceed those of major parts of the migration itself. With EZV we set a target of recreating the VPlus UI exactly, including all features, bugs, and eccentricities that applications rely on. The aim is that users running a migrated application should have no idea that the underlying hardware and operating system have changed completely. Whilst keeping the UI the same, the underlying technology is based on “open” structured XML, and maintenance is via a new .NET formspec replacement product. Fear not, you don’t have to hack raw XML (unless you want to) to maintain the screens or processing specs as the EZV Designer takes care of this for you. We don’t contract for migration projects at ScreenJet, so EZV has been designed to interface with any language, database or other migration technologies you choose (or your migration partner uses) and to run on virtually any platform or OS that supports HP terminals. In fact, EZV is the only VPlus migration technology that is also available for the HP3000, so you can test and prove it — before you migrate another line of code anywhere.

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Version control via Windows, data cleanup, data marts can help

By David GreerMB Foster Associates

Many customers decide to stay with the HP 3000 because of its extraordinary reliability and the low cost of ownership. When working with both homesteading and migrating customers, we see a number of practices around application and data management that can provide benefits now and in the future.

Change Management HP 3000 applications have been developed over many years. This makes the applications highly effective to organizations because they accurately reflect the business rules of the organization. Any application built over time faces challenges matching all source code to all running production code. Many HP 3000 sites do not have a formal change management process for their applications. Change management typically is implemented in two parts: version control and governance. Did you know that you can put your HP 3000 source code under the control of a version control system such as Microsoft Visual Source Safe? Doing so allows an organization to identify and document all component pieces of each application. The effort and knowledge gained reduces the risk to the organization, by formalizing the knowledge that is often scattered around

many individuals. A governance process for the release of new versions of HP 3000 applications further reduces the risk of changes. A version control system helps. It causes organizations to assign version numbers and identify all specific files that need to be changed to implement an application change. A formalized development, test and release governance process makes sure that IT, users, and management are aligned when it comes to releasing new versions of the software. Not only does this reduce organizational risk on numerous fronts, it sets up an organization for future change. We have yet to see a successful migration that did not have strong change management and governance. Data Management A second area where HP 3000 sites can improve performance is in data management. Redundant data can cost organizations millions of dollars every year. As many HP 3000 databases have been developed over decades, they often have large amounts of duplicate data. We have observed and participated in cases where rationalizing both duplicate data and the amount of historic data has resulted in large space reductions while speeding up batch processing by over ten times. Another major focus area for HP 3000 improvement is cleaning up data. We advocate that you set up simple job streams to check for bad data nightly or weekly and report it directly to affected

users. At a recent conference, the Registrar of a major Canadian college reported they now check all data nightly and mail suspected bad data directly to users responsible for entering it. Removing bad data reduces the amount of data in your database and insures that people who depend on this data make the right decisions. In our migration work, it is common to have to spend a lot of time cleansing data before migrating it — much quicker if your data’s already clean. We have seen many HP 3000 sites leverage a data mart. A data mart provides an alternative view of your HP 3000 data in a popular SQL database such as SQL Server. While introducing redundant data, the benefits outweigh the costs, especially when the data is transformed as part of the replication process. Using SQL Server allows HP 3000 sites to hire and train experts in the latest technologies speeding delivery and lowering costs. Some sites are building all new functionality on top of MS SQL Server using bidirectional database replication technology. Over time the business becomes less dependent on the HP 3000 application. It also ensures that if you do migrate, the majority of your interface points are to SQL Server. Many of these ideas can be introduced as a project or one application at a time, letting you spread out the implementation cost. The biggest hurdle is making the commitment to change the way you do things now, to increase your ability to execute in the future.

14 The 3000 NewsWire • November 2010 • 3000newswire.com/blog

YOUMay be one of the few people in the worldthat this advert is targeted at!If you’re running TRANSACT or DICTIONARY/3000 we now have a lift and shift solution to other platforms. Transact has been reborn as TransAction.For further info just contact sales@screenjet.com.

Ways to Boost the HP 3000’s Effectiveness

Limited time offer gives c7000, blade for UX license, support

For customers who want to begin training on the hardware and system configurations of the latest HP-UX servers — part of a responsible migration project, don’t you know — there’s a free HP deal that’s been extended through April of next year. When a customer purchases licenses for HP-UX, as well as an HP support package, the vendor will throw in a new BL860C blade server — as well as the c7000 BladeSystem enclosure with two power supplies, a power module and four fan. HP is loading the blade server, one of the best ways to stay on the leading edge of Integrity hardware, with 8GB of memory. HP calls the deal the Integrity Blade Starter Kit, but it appears that starting an HP support contract as well as HP-UX use is the primary revenue point for the vendor. There are fine print points to observe in order to qualify, and HP is enabling the free blade and enclosure through a credit of what the vendor calls “up to $12,000.” Hardware capital costs are not a major part of the expense of making a migration. HP 3000 customers rarely mention the price of the iron while they make a transition; often the replacement software package (off-the-shelf) can cost

at least as much. For example, there’s database expenses to shoulder (Oracle or SQL Server license seats, as well as the third party tools to replace built-in 3000 functionality like jobstream management, for example.) But any five-figure HP discounts on hardware are welcome in an era where 3000 migrations are proceeding more slowly due to budget constraints. We haven’t seen a hardware giveaway on the enterprise level in a long time from HP. As you might expect, this freebie comes from HP’s proprietary

systems line. There doesn’t appear to be a complementary industry-standard server giveaway for ProLiant systems running Windows or Linux.

The fine print conditions offer the free enclosure and server to customers who have not bought HP-UX hardware since 2008. To qualify for this offer, a customer may not have purchased any of the following products in the three years prior to offer redemption, as demonstrated by invoice history and service contracts: HP 9000 servers, HP AlphaServer, HP NonStop servers, HP Integrity servers, and the HP

ProLiant DL785 or DL980 servers. You can also use your Starter Kit credit against the price of any other Integrity server system, configured any way you need. If your reseller discounts that Integrity hardware, the savings comes off

the HP giveaway credit. (You refer to credit product number AM348AS if you’re doing your own procurement, without a reseller involved.) The credit amount may be applied to alternative HP Integrity server blade configurations, which may differ from the Integrity Blades Starter Kit configuration offered under this promotion, at the choice of the qualifying customer. Any

discounts applied to the purchase of the Integrity Blade Starter Kit will be applied as a reduction to the credit amount. HP’s offer seems to be aimed at the Sun and IBM Unix customer base, mentioned specifically in the extension notice of the giveaway. The Sun group at Oracle now has former HP CEO Mark Hurd at its system sales and marketing helm, doing his new job while Oracle works to prove that new HP CEO Leo Apotheker had oversight of SAP’s admitted theft of Oracle intellectual property. These companies, Oracle and HP, are competing in a serious way for the alternative Unix system purchase. If the 3000 site has held off from introducing HP 9000 or Integrity systems up to now, why not profit from this price war to get started with a very capable Integrity blade system and enclosure?

15The 3000 NewsWire • November 2010 • 3000newswire.com/blog

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Starting a support contract plus HP-UX licenses is the primary revenue point for

the vendor in the deal

VEsoft co-founder continues tour of customers

If you’re wondering who Vladimir is and what he’s done for HP 3000 customers, the founder of VEsoft would be glad to educate your IT pros. Mr. Volokh’s been on the road visiting his customer sites in Texas since Nov. 1, one of numerous two-week trips he makes in modest rental cars across the US. A very limited number of 3000 solution vendors still do this sort of personal contact. It’s especially notable considering the size of VEsoft’s 3000-only customer base.

“We have 1,700 customers today,” he told us at a lunch in San Marcos, just after a consulting visit at a manufacturer in the city. And so the debate and estimates about the size of the

3000 market just got a fresh, first-hand data point. (We’d like to point out that if one vendor can count 1,700 companies, the total number of users has got to be a lot bigger than 2,000 firms worldwide.) Volokh, whose company has sold MPE/iX extension software for 30 years, says the majority of his customers do business on 3000s in North America alone. As for his news that he’s spreading, this 72-year-old dean of 3000 vendor firms was most effusive about his sons. The most famous is Eugene, another 3000 icon known best by this first name only. By now this 42-year-old has become a professor at the UCLA School of Law and often-quoted expert in the media about First Amendment matters. The most senior 3000 IT pros remember Eugene as a precocious, brilliant developer who with his father founded VEsoft (the first two letters stand for their

name), cutting a wide swath by extending the 3000’s OS with MPEX. Vladimir still consults at a reasonable rate to teach security and management (also using his Security/3000) as well as lessons on MPE/iX built-in features. He doesn’t see much use

of any of these products’ manuals, however. His honesty in evaluating the 3000 market spills over to its future. “Luckily for us, if it’s dying, it is dying very slowly,” he told my partner Abby and I over grape leaves and pita at the Cedars Greek restaurant. “But when they laugh at this, I tell customers, ‘We are all dying very slowly.’ “ He reported updates on the new life in his realm, the growth of three grandsons, one by his son Sasha (also a law professor, at Emory University) and two from Eugene. The eldest grandson is 7 years old, or just five years younger than when Eugene worked as an intern over the holidays at the Hewlett-Packard 3000 division in 1980. (The photo below includes Allegro Consultants’ Stan Sieler peering just over Eugene’s shoulder inside HP’s labs.) Vladimir brought this copy of HP’s January 1981 The News newsletter to prove it. It may seem like ancient history, but almost 30 years later, he says Eugene still

consults on MPEX development matters, when he’s not teaching law or writing papers, or editing the third edition of his First Amendment law textbook. With 1,700 customers mostly in the US, has Vladimir been contacted by the creators of Zelus, the 2011 HP 3000 emulator product? No, he reports. He believes the timing of that product — delayed by HP’s legal maneuvers, in part — means it will make little difference in that rate of decline. “The customers who are left, they don’t make up a market where [Zelus] could be sold in hundreds of copies,” he said. “You need thousands of users for that, and one in 10 might be interested.” Eight years ago in an interview with the NewsWire, he reminded us, “I said that emulation might work. And Allegro [Consultants] might do it.” HP’s delays and legal issues kept Allegro from participating, he believes. But Vladimir also has faith in the ability of 3000 work to keep its users vital. One customer he visited had marked down the remaining weeks to retirement, 59 by his count. “He was like marking off days and months in a prison cell,” Vladimir said. “I tell them, ‘If you retire, you become an old man. If you don’t retire, you are an old pro.’ “

16 The 3000 NewsWire • November 2010 • 3000newswire.com/blog

Vladimir spreads news for 2011 to 3000 sites

Automate notices of news Links to reports on our NewsWire blog can arrive in your in-box, thanks to the reach of Twitter or the Constant Contact email service. An automated feed of stories and news items arrive via Twitter. The tweets also include news links related to HP enterprise computing. Using a free Twitter account, follow us at our address: 3000newswire. In addition to Twitter, once each week a simple and concise email can arrive in your inbox, summarizing the latest stories, with a link to each. Sign up for this reminder of our week’s news, with easy unsubscribes, with a “Mail news” email subject to rseybold@sbcglobal.net.

Vladimir’s son Eugene, co-founder of VEsoft, worked at HP dur-ing December of 1980. Eugene was only 12 at the time, accord-ing to the report from The News, an HP company newsletter

17The 3000 NewsWire • November 2010 • 3000newswire.com/blog

Eloquence adds 64-bit Win, UX improvements

NonStop note flows from HP 3000’s eliminator

New version supports Microsoft’s most preferred environment

Marxmeier Software founder Michael Marxmeier announced a release of his company’s Eloquence database which includes improvements for HP’s Unix, and the Linux environments which need IMAGE-like functionality. Marxmeier is calling the software B.08.10 update 1, a fresh version of the software initially released in July. Eloquence has long supported Windows, including the 8.00 release, but the 8.10 version has been working toward extending its support of Microsoft’s environment most preferred by migrating HP 3000 sites. “32-bit and 64-bit Windows versions are supported,” Marxmeier reports. “Selected Eloquence components are installed both as 32-bit and 64-bit binaries, such as the database server and the client libraries. On 64-bit Windows, the installation program allows administrators to choose between activating the 32-bit or the 64-bit database server.”

Eloquence received kudos for its IMAGE-like design from HP’s own IMAGE labs more than eight years ago. Tien-You Chen, the IMAGE Lab Manager, spoke at the 2002 HP World conference along with Marxmeier, giving a talk together to help anoint the database as a best successor for companies leaving the HP 3000. Robelle relayed Chen’s Eloquence commentary when the database was still very new to the 3000 world. “Tien-You is sorry to see TurboIMAGE retired,” ran the report. “But he is ‘happy to tell you we have found a perfect replacement.’ It was interesting to have Tien-You Chen give this portion of the talk, since he was an independent source to review how compatible Eloquence and IMAGE are. It is important to note that although all the DB calls are compatible from an application perspective, Eloquence is certainly a different type of database under the hood.” This newest version of the database which behaves most like the IMAGE/

SQL can co-exist with the 8.00 release, so users can cut over on a schedule that permits reliability testing. It can be downloaded, with versions for all of HP’s 3000 migration alternatives, at Marxmeier’s website eloquence.marxmeier.com. For the database administration expert, a few notes about enhancements

to Eloquence: It’s got an improved database server HTTP status and has added filter support to the HTTP status Eloquence’s update also has a changed dbkeyupdate function, to allow deleting data encryption keys from a database

not using encryption. The version also fixed a limitation in the decompiler (“LIST”) that caused a problem with array member variables passed to a SUB/FN. The B.08.10 update 1 improved DLL interoperability with 32 and 64 bit Eloquence DLLs. The new eloqcore can now use 32 and 64 bit Eloquence DLLs that are linked against the most recent libeqdll library.

Former GM Prather touts futures with tried message

November is a month filled with memory for many a 3000 owner and user. Some of the sting of watching HP eliminate its futures for the 3000 nine years ago is sparked by the latest enthusiasm offered by HP’s NonStop general manager, Winston Prather. NonStop enjoyed its first exclusive conference this fall, the same year that Prather is finishing up his fourth year as GM of the server’s Enterprise Division. Prather held the very last post of General Manager for the 3000, a job where he said it was his decision alone to announce the “end of life” (as HP loves to call it) of the server still running many a major organization. You can pretty much see the retread from his 3000 talks in his message in the NonStop bimonthly magazine, The Connection. “With all the changes we’ve made... we’ve stayed true to the what NonStop has always done best: delivering the scalability, availability and integrity you rely on to run your business. It’s a NonStop, not a Tandem. The difference is real, the fundamentals remain.” Fundamentals remain on duty at many HP 3000 shops which Prather predicted would be long ago migrated. But the struggle

continues to eliminate an IT asset as quickly as he eliminated 3000 futures. One customer wrote us — and didn’t want their name used, for fear of risking a severance package — about an organization’s second attempt to replace a custom-built application. “The packages we’ve been sold, complete with rosy allegations of full asset management functionality, simply don’t have it,” the manager said.

Some kinds of applications are custom-written all over the world, the manager added, and “whole concepts of our line of business are obviously brand new to the programmers.” This manager retired a month ago, only a few weeks after the organization’s “conversion staff was only now asking for descriptions of the old database. They’re obviously not converting anything; they’re just going to archive the data and hope they can refer to it later.” In the meantime, the company’s management dropped all support for the HP 3000s, even though one lost a disk drive and failed to boot from it. Other than a daily full backup, there’s not even a shadow of support for the systems. Without a tool like Adager to rely upon any longer, “the database will overfill (workorder lines keep on coming!) in

about four weeks.” Which would have been sometime last See Eliminator, page 19

Support firms configure systems

HP will remain in the 3000 support business during 2011, but only in a limited role. Aside from HP’s under-the-radar contracts that independent support vendors are reporting (see story, facing page), there’s a Time & Materials option for critical services like setting CPU name and HPSUSAN numbers on replacement or upgraded 3000 boards. But is HP’s Time & Materials response — which has no guarantee of any deadline or an established price list — the only avenue for this work? Indie support providers report that HP has engineered back doors into configuring 3000 PA-RISC hardware. There’s been ample research around the world to document PA-RISC system use with Linux. Stromasys, working on the Zelus 3000 emulator for release next year, piloted the product by booting a PA-RISC emulator with Linux. The reports indicate a better understanding of the 3000 server hardware’s internals than expected. As one example, a dual-port SCSI card is part of the IO board on HP’s A-Class servers. HP’s own documentation details that, so a third party might leverage the information to introduce older SCSI to the later models of the 3000. HP, for the record, doesn’t support this SCSI card in the newer models. But as 3000 vets like to say, SCSI is SCSI. The blend of newer server and older IO is one element to enable upgrades to later model servers. That expense of going to the A-Class or N-Class servers from 9x9 systems can be justified. Aside from power savings, the ultimate generation of 3000s is younger than 9x9 or 9x8 predecessors, and some support companies say it’s easier to find replacement parts for the newer models. What’s more, there’s value in the range of performance available on the N- and A-Class servers. You need a expert support source, comfortable with experimenting on PA-RISC, to get to greater speeds or eight-processor HP 3000s. But it can be done. And the task apparently doesn’t conflict with HP attempts to block 3000 internals configuration. The companies who will offer an alternative to HP Time & Materials try to keep a low profile on the work. Nobody wants a demand letter from HP

to halt a business offering, something that competing with HP’s support might trigger. So they’re coy about identifying themselves, either using an alias like “Captain GREB” in public messages from Immediate Recovery Systems, or keeping their company name out of reports. But in two separate interviews within hours of a single day, we’ve heard 3000 veterans say they believe that HP doesn’t care any longer about such services. HP seems only to sell this kind of support on

demand, and only to customers who view HP branding as crucial. There was a time not long ago when configuring HP CPU boards was considered HP’s exclusive business, even by people who knew how to deliver that service. Hewlett-Packard’s 3000 unit even modified its license interpretation — not actual licenses signed by customers — to proscribe

modifying the 3000’s stable storage. If you did this, you were outside of HP’s license terms and couldn’t even place a Time & Materials call. HP’s language was broad enough to try to cover engineering for the back door configurations. It’s all hung on a tacked-on Right To Use (RTU) license, little-used by the community today. There’s two reasons to make these modifications. The first is to replace a failed board, or write an HPSUSAN number onto new CPU boards so existing software will continue to run — when the software vendor is out of business and can’t reissue a release to match a new HPSUSAN number. Those HP 2007 and 2008 warnings might not matter, even in a legal sense. The latest reports reveal that 3000 configurations are being altered without changes to stable storage. A back door into the 3000’s memory space gets a job done which HP can only do on T&M next year. We hear a healthy share of off-the-record reports about these back-door successes. They arrive with enough technical detail to make us believe the independent support community can match anything HP will cut back on offering after Dec. 31, the work it will push into its T&M outskirts. “That doesn’t work; best of luck,” customers say they hear from HP’s support about some configuration challenges. This

kind of work keeps 3000s running even while migrations are in play — the budget dance that funds migrations out of operations while 3000s run at their superior price performance marks. Customers are asking indie support providers to step in with solutions where HP is reluctant to work during 2011.

IRS and its open offer Independent support providers can still provide a reset of HP 3000 CPUNAME and HPSUSAN ID numbers, according to an online message posted for the 3000 community. The parameters are crucial to continued use of HP 3000s after upgrades or CPU and board failures. HP is not the only avenue to pursue for these specialized services. Immediate Recovery Solutions offers this Processor Dependent Code (PDC) change for PA-RISC servers, reiterated in a recent message from a technical expert who’s called himself Captain Greb for more than four years by now. GREBs are the IRS products known as Generic REplacement Boxes, PA-RISC hardware built by HP which can be assigned a 3000’s CPU ID as well as the HPSUSAN string. Software vendors check the HPSUSAN to verify legal licenses for applications and utilities. The “Captain” told the NewsWire last month that the company still will not sell

its SSEDIT software, the program which it uses to set identities for the PA-RISC systems. “SSEDIT is our proprietary service tool and is not for sale,” he said. “Why would we sell a program that

could be easily copied or hacked by unscrupulous types?” But now IRS has announced hardware for sale for the first time, PA-RISC systems like the one pictured above, which looks much like an A-Class server. HP sold this kind of box in non-MPE versions, too. The IRS two-processor box has been listed for sale, although there’s no mention of MPE/iX being installed in a message to 3000 users. IRS says, “We have agreements with select third party software support companies for system board initialization, and will work with self-supporting end users. We still offer custom solutions. “SSEDIT’s been around since 1995,” said former exec Steve Pirie, “and HP has had a good look at it.”

18 The 3000 NewsWire • November 2010 • 3000newswire.com/blog

Independent support plumbs 3000 internals

19The 3000 NewsWire • November 2010 • 3000newswire.com/blog

3000 support firms still competing with HPDespite HP deadline, vendor still

bids for select 2011 contracts

It doesn’t matter what HP has told the marketplace about its march to exit the 3000 support business, says one independent 3000 support company. Hewlett-Packard is still taking steps to win support for 3000 installations large and small in 2011. This is not an official worldwide HP position, notes Pivital Solutions president Steve Suraci. But all the talk of Dec. 31 being the absolute end of HP’s maintenance for 3000 sites is a message that’s not accurate in more than a few places around North America. “It’s very location-driven, but we’re still competing against HP,” he said. “Florida must be an area where HP feels they’ve got local resources, and can continue to support the 3000.” His company specializes in 3000 support, so it’s not like HP’s bidding contracts which go up against Pivital’s Windows and HP-UX support as well as MPE. The HP bidding extends to single-system, single-site customers, he added. Other support companies confirm that HP is sending letters to 3000 sites to confirm 2011 support. It’s a matter of inertia for HP to reel in the business it

swears it will drop in December. “For these customers it’s easier to stick with HP, no matter what they want to charge them [for 2011], than it is to move to someone else’s support. Like everybody else in this economy, HP is continuing to find ways to make money off the 3000.” After “end of life” extensions in 2005 and in 2007, the reach of HP into the customer community and its support future continues. “To me, it’s a little disappointing once again that they’re finding more ways to complicate this.” Suraci said. “I was looking forward to the day when I wouldn’t be competing with HP for 3000 support. I’m still looking for that day.” HP said eight years ago that it would be supporting some 3000 customers after its official end of support date. But at the time, that end of support was the end of 2006. Brokers are also reporting that HP has supplied sites with HP 3000 servers, even cutting third parties out of deals with a competitive price for a server the vendor hasn’t built in almost seven years. “There are still a fair number of customers doing hardware upgrades these days,” Suraci reported, “one more go at it for whatever the next number of years might be for them.” One official way to engage HP in

3000 support during 2011 will a Time & Materials call, something used to revive a fried CPU board or something as simple as download a patch. But a call into HP’s support department for a 3000 has a good chance of getting misdirected these days, according to reports from Suraci and customer sites. “Try placing that support call for a 3000,” he said. “If you don’t get into their printer support or their camera support — those are products where they have 3000 models now — you find that HP 3000 support isn’t readily available anymore. The contacts that a customer would have used in the past are no longer there, and if they are at HP, they’re doing something else nowadays.” Another support supplier and hardware reseller said answering a hardware call in 2011 would be easy for an HP tech, who could swap a part into a 9x9 or later and get the machine “working” from a hardware perspective. “They are all just Unix system parts,” he said. “But what happens when a hardware problem causes an issue that is not related to hardware, like a corrupt file? Who’s going to walk that end user through the process of getting their 3000 back online? It’s a much easier system to manage.”

month. Of such high-level organization’s decisions — running a 3000 until it careens into a ditch, or over the side of a bridge — are a system manager’s nightmares conjured. “I’ll return to the fray seeking work,” said this 3000 pro. “But what I’ll do is in the air — obviously not much 3000 development going on, but I may be just the ticket for maintenance projects, or I can be valuable in a conversion. I know I’m employable and there are a few 3000 community residents who know I’m reasonably smart; I’ll be okay.” There’s not much point in trying to learn why Prather decided to kill off his company’s future with such specialized organizations, all while he saw the Tandem customer GMs move into HP’s future. NonStop made it and the 3000 didn’t — but along the road, the scalability, availability and integrity relied upon by some businesses is now in the hands of migration and conversion companies sent in to muck out the mess.

Eliminator(Continued from page 17)

Look at what has been added to Suprtool™ on MPEsince HP announced the end of the HP 3000!

Wow!• Format numeric fields like COBOL ($edit)• Accept free-form numerics ($number)• Break text into fields based on a separator ($split) • Many-to-Many links (Join in Suprlink) • Compute running totals on sort breaks ($Subtotal)• Remove garbage characters from text fields (Clean/Findclean) • Insert an incrementing counter to a record ($Counter)

The HP-UX version of Suprtool has these, plus Eloquence and AMXW support.

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“ I’ve been an IBM programmer for the past seven years andnow find myself in the HP 3000 world. I am totally impressedwith the tools you've created. My favorite so far is Suprtool.It is comparable to many of the IBM data manipulation toolsI’ve used as far as power and ease of use goes. My sincerestcompliments.” –Michael Vealey, University of Maryland

20 The 3000 NewsWire • November 2010 • 3000newswire.com/blog

A veteran of 26 years on the HP 3000, Steve Davidek is looking toward a dif-ferent future in his IT career. He’s the IT operations and Systems Administrator for the City of Sparks, Nev. But sometime in 2012 the last HP 3000 app will step out of production mode at the city that’s not far from Reno. During that same year, Davidek will take another step, into the chair of president for the one remain-ing HP user group, Connect. He’s been serving on the group’s board of directors since 2008, volunteered in Encompass user group advocacy programs before then, and even worked in Interex local and regional user groups for 20 years, until the group went bankrupt in 2005. Davidek is managing HP 3000s which were supposed to be offline already, but homesteading has a way of occupying more of the future than managers expect. For all of the devotion and experience he’s developed for the server, however, it’s time for his shop — where he started as an operator and now manages a staff that handles two 3000s, hundreds of PCs and several dozen Windows servers — to move into the world of Windows. Davidek has embraced change with a sense of humor about setbacks; he chuckled repeatedly even while telling stories of revisions of management plans. It’s the sound of humor you would expect from a man who’s an Honor Society Order of the Arrow award winner as a Boy Scout leader, the kind of leadership that seemed to fit into a story of transition, told by a pro whose first HP IT chapters were written on Series III HP 3000s.

You work in IT at a US city that’s cut back in a big way. How did that affect moving away from the HP 3000?

Just before they started cutting things we signed on the dotted line for a new financial system and get us off the HP 3000. Not that we wanted to, but we had to move forward. We went live with that part of the project last December. After our HP 3000 died in April, they decided this July to give us a little money to get the payroll system moved off, too.

The payroll 3000 died? What happened?

I just came in one day and the system board died on the 969. We’d moved that 3000 in here in September of ‘96. We’re at 7.0 MPE/iX. Every time we tried 7.5

we had issues with it not reading the second CPU in it.

Did these failures present the first reason to move away?

We were supposed to be off the 3000 five years ago. We did another upgrade to our financials, Bi-Tech, something we’ve been running for 18 years. We realized after we got going the system couldn’t handle the city’s finances. Back then the finance department decided they wanted a new system that didn’t involve IT. But what they picked out couldn’t handle the job of General Ledger. We ended up going back to the 3000 after being off it for a year with GL. It was still running payroll. As HP was slowly ramping down, we realized that we needed a more modern system. Plus, finances are really important to the city. Bi-Tech quit

developing on us 10 years ago. They were like others; if HP’s not going to support the 3000, they weren’t going to move forward. The system to handle the courts was running on the 3000, too. It was written in-house in the late ‘70s. We turned that system off six months ago. They put the new cases on the new system and just kept the open cases on the 3000 until they got them all. They access that 3000 almost daily, just for history. They’ll do that until we’re off the 3000s totally — there’s a 928 development machine — about 18 months from now.

Has that development staff been able to embrace the new Windows environment?

In Nevada’s economy, we’ve laid off a lot of people. The city went from 760 to 450 people. IT was literally cut in half. We’ve got one person who’s been with the city for 32 years, and he was the development support person for years. We have a newer person who’s the reason we’re using SQL Server databases.

Why did you decide to turn away from developing your own systems, or modernize the systems you already had?

We realized the resources weren’t here. I talked to people in the user groups, my connections from Interex and Encompass and now and Connect. It’s one of those things where we just had to bite the bullet and move away. They all pretty much said the same thing.

Has training in the new systems presented problems?

Not really. But let me tell you, the new financials — I’m still trying to figure out how to pay bills part of the time. I’m learning things about finances that I never had to do before for my bills in IT.

It sounds as if your migration was never approached as a calamity. How are you able to weather all this change of the situation, given all your 3000 work?

Well, I took the city from a Series III. But then we started up with Windows NT, and before that used an OS2 LAN manager. We started going in the Windows direction for a few things. I did HP-UX OpenMail for a number of years. We’ve kind of evolved over the last 26 years. I watched us go from terminals to where we are today. It’s moving forward, and you’ve got to keep moving forward. You can’t block modern technology just because it might be hard to manage. That’s always been my thing: what’s the next step that can make our jobs easier?

When you say hard to manage, do you mean the way the new tech is designed compared to the HP 3000?

Let me tell you — you just can’t beat the way the HP 3000 runs. You can do so much more with the MPE operating system. It’s so much move robust than people ever realized. But you can’t just keep looking at that. The city manager wants to use his iPad, connected to our network. We can’t just tell him no. We’ve got to look at the future, these handheld devices. You have to be able to look at your data from that level and at the desktop, laptops or whatever the next great thing is out there, but look at it securely.

Warming to Sparks of Change at a City in TransitionSteve Davidek

Steve DavidekIT Operations & Systems

AdministratorCity of Sparks

21The 3000 NewsWire • November 2010 • 3000newswire.com/blog

What’s going to happen in the shutdown during 2012?

The 3000 will be there for looking at older records. The plan is to do a last dump of the payroll data for the last couple of years into a SQL Server database, then figure out how to write an interface so if we have to do lookups we can. Beyond that the 3000 will just be sitting here for history until we don’t legally have to keep the data around.

Did you need to hire an outside provider to help move the apps off?

We really didn’t need to. We had totally new systems. We looked at HP-UX but didn’t really get bids we liked. We wrote the links to pull the data out of our IMAGE databases into the SQL database for our current financials, both times that we did it. We’re not migrating the system, we’re going to something fresh.

How did your involvement with the user groups, and Connect, help you with this transition?

Ever since I first got involved in a local Interex user group in 1985, talking to other members, seeing what they’re doing, and then trying things out has

probably been the best thing that has happened. The other thing that’s helped is that as our training budget has gone down, we’re been able to have local meetings for Encompass and now Connect, where we’re able to pass on information you couldn’t get for free, if you weren’t involved in a user group of some kind.

You found them on a social network, or a chat group?

When we started with this, those things weren’t there yet. A lot of it is that we’ve all been involved with it for so many years. There even used to be a Bi-Tech user group. The thing they liked the most

is that they were able to interact with people who were doing similar things.

So you’re one of two officers of Connect with extensive 3000 background. Were there things you found at this year’s HP Tech Forum that helped you in your migration?

Not really. Connect hasn’t had a huge presence with the 3000. I know with both Chris (Koppe) and I you’d think there’d be more. I’ve been hearing a lot of rumor about doing something with the old CSL. But it’s like [3000 customers] haven’t really needed much. The 3000 community has been working with the 3000-L and communicating through that for years. OpenMPE, same thing. The real vocal people have been involved there.

You’ll be president in a little over a year. Is there a role for Connect to play for the 3000 by then?

I still watch 3000-L every day. But I think Connect can be a place where they can help each other. Especially if they’re looking at migration issues. Or even keeping things running, I’d love to have face to face meetings with 3000 users like we had in the OpenMPE meeting in Vegas this year.

Top 10 insurance firm begins migration workSpeedware to launch project for

Fortune 100 customer

Nine years after HP announced the end of its HP 3000 business, one of the world’s top 10 insurance suppliers will just be starting its migration away from the server. Speedware, which has already turned off about 730 of the systems in migrations, will work in a $2.5 million engagement for services and product licenses. Speedware calls the work legacy modernization services for one of “many organizations, including this insurance company, [which] rely on mission-critical enterprise applications and databases that run on the HP e3000.” Speedware needs to be circumspect about naming the company, which is based in North America. Such are the restraints of 2010, when technology choices and contracts are considered trade secrets by enterprise IT customers, executives who don’t want their names in the press. But Speedware’s marketing director Chris Koppe did confirm that the insurance firm has many other enterprise environments in operation already, and

the company has been an HP 3000 user since at least the 1980s. News of a Fortune 100 company just launching its journey away from MPE/iX runs counter to the concept that big IT shops could make their moves soonest. “Even with the end of vendor support scheduled in December, this contract demonstrates that many large organizations are still finalizing plans regarding their HP e3000,” said Andy Kulakowski, President of Speedware. He added, “We know this market so well we would have been very disappointed had we not been awarded the contract. Our migration team is looking forward to helping this company achieve success as well.” Speedware’s migration pitch includes a message that every one of its projects has been a success. When Speedware completes its 15-month project for the insurance giant, “This will be the first piece, for these guys. They went for Oracle as a target database, and ScreenJet’s EZV (a VPlus migration and enhancement suite from ScreenJet),” Koppe said. COBOL will be moved across to Micro Focus,

a job scheduler must be migrated, and PowerHouse needs to be moved to HP’s Unix servers from the 3000. Of the $2.5 million in the project, only licenses for Speedware’s own AMXW and ScreenJet’s EZV are part of the total. The rest is services such as code migration and project management. The large corporation “has been looking at this [HP 3000] problem for as much as seven years,” Koppe said. Inquiries to multiple vendors took time over the years, then commitments to projects which were then postponed — a typical project profile for the largest of HP 3000 shops. “This is actually our longest sales cycle for a customer,” he added, going back to 2003. “They’re a big organization, and there’s always shifting priorities at those. You have to tackle things when the time is right. Eventually the infrastructure becomes somewhat fragile, and the skillsets to maintain it get challenged over time. Those are the things that ultimately escalate the urgency of dealing with these things. For this company, it’s gotten to the point where they have to deal with it.”

We’ve kind of evolved over the last 26 years. I watched us go from

terminals to where we are today. You’ve got to keep moving forward. You can’t block modern technology just because it might be

hard to manage.

In a world where the unexpected is everyday news — it almost sounds like a trailer for a thriller where nature’s laws are under attack. But that’s the world you’re living in today, a place where communication is lashed to the locomotive of technology, hurtling toward messages cryptic and constant. Or not, as a large portion of our readers choose. You can stick to older habits to get your news. You can’t pick your places to post what’s news if you’re creating content, however. Some readers rely on the Web, others just email, and a few see the need to social network in communities or in the Twitterverse. We need to spread the 3000 news all ways as well as always, even while we still woo you with the ink and paper you’re holding that brought us to this dance. This set of destinations on our journey is crowded because we’ve got more choices than ever thanks to the Web, darn it. People expect Facebook to be launching email service this month, something that will probably push the NewsWire onto the pages of that community whcih Abby and I already employ for personal and professional use in the rest of our lives. Chief among the losers, if Facebook’s half-billion users get an @fb.com mailbox, will be Gmail, say the experts. Today you can get notice of our news in your email box, Gmail or otherwise, with a simple subscribe message. Some readers say they don’t read any other way but in a bunch, when five or more story links surface in a message. We push out every one of those stories as we finish them on Twitter, which has a much smaller use among IT pros in their 40s, 50s and older. Even before there was ubiquitous email, technology called a listserv gave me proof that we could feed the maw of a dozen newsletters a year, plus online updates. We track the 3000-L, as its close to 1,000 subscribers and readers call it, every day, just like our Q&A subject Steve Davidek of the Connect user group board of directors does. Davidek is migrating about as slowly as most of you — his project started in 2005, got reversed a bit, and now might be complete in

2012. But he’s an embracer of new technology. He’s probably even got a Twitter account @stevedavidek. But as the next president of Connect, he represents another avenue of news traffic: the

website community. The group runs myCommunity, a collective with social networking options between users of HP enterprise computer solutions. This is less focused than the 3000-L but better aimed than a raft of HP’s Twitter feeds, and adds an old-school aspect: notices of the group’s in-person meetings, low-tech confabs that Davidek swears by as a guide into the future. Finally there’s our own HP 3000 group at LinkedIn, the Facebook for the business professional crowd. We’re at 215 members now after starting the HP 3000 group there, a healthy share that chats among themselves about 3000 matters. You should get on LinkedIn to job search. Connections are the payoff for any venue in the world.

22 The 3000 NewsWire • November 2010 • 3000newswire.com/blog

Ron Seybold, Editor

newswire.com/blog

Fall 2010 Articles, Only on the BlogMigration

Veterans resign their skills to transitions 11/10/10MB Foster reports on emerging EIM program 10/19/10Earning a Seat for Government Migrations 10/15/10HP hugs Oracle with Unix v3 Update 7 10/6/10Cognos hunts licenses as support recedes 9/29/10Speedware offers time shifter for migrations 9/14/10HP’s customers push back on paid patches 8/24/10Value of PowerHouse dev skills: $18/hour? 8/18/10

Homesteading 3000s’ IDs protect independent SW vendors 11/1/10MB Foster keys on 3000 application support 10/29/10New eFORMz adds XML, HTML for e-forms 10/28/10Let Open Source Open 3000 Doors 9/28/103000 Labor Plus User Group Management 9/6/10Whatever got conjured up about invent3k? 9/1/10Mitigating Risks in the HP 3000 Environment 8/30/10Emulator’s customers: Plentiful, says Pivital 8/25/10Emulator company reaches out to partners 8/13/10

News Outta HPHurd’s aftershocks emerge in two reports 11/9/10HP wants to fast-track its certifications 10/21/10HP’s support data for 3000 cut to manuals 10/18/10HP networked storage on view via Connect 10/14/10Low expectations forecast for HP’s board 10/13/10HP says everything’s great on financial slate 8/20/10

NewsmakersUnix Xserve line gets a rapid Apple boot 11/8/10IBM CEO calls HP’s bluffed up growth deals 9/17/10HP, Oracle hurl claims of damage via Hurd 9/8/10Hurd mentality slips into Oracle’s boardroom 9/7/10HP user group names new marketing chief 8/31/10

User ReportsOracle support makes case for open source 11/4/10More notes on 3000 SFTP, and HP’s advice 10/27/10Discover the New World of 2011: HP Maybe 10/11/10

Hidden ValueGetting OpenSSL, SFTP Working on 3000s 10/25/10Tape data to disc files and setting Posix time 10/20/10Restrict 3000 access, link web console, UPS 9/30/10Products, programs push remote printing 8/16/10

HistoryBuilding Beyond Our 15-Year Foundation 10/1/10How Many 3000s, Once More 9/24/10First Flashes of 15 Years Ago 9/21/10The “Vaunted” HP Way 8/19/10

Web Resources3000’s CSL bounty bounds into new view 9/27/10Shared Knowledge: The 3000’s CSL 9/7/10

Get first notice of news on Twitter: @3000newswire

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