←Part 33
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 The HP e3000—HP's Announcementby George StachnikOrdinarily, in this space you would have found part 34 of the series of articles entitled, "The HP 3000 for Complete Novices." But in the light of HP's recent announcements concerning the HP e3000 business, I thought it would make a lot more sense to put off part 34 until next time around, and instead use this issue's article to talk about just exactly what HP has announced, what it means to HP e3000 customers, and what the future of the HP e3000 really looks like. On November 14, 2001, Hewlett-Packard announced to its customers and partners that it is recommending that they begin planning a transition away from the HP e3000. HP plans to end sales and support of the HP e3000 over a five-year window. The majority of HP e3000 customers seemed to take the announcement in stride. On one hand, many have been expecting this announcement (or something like it) for quite some time. On the other hand, the fact that HP did announce an end to the HP e3000 was still a shock. But after examining what HP really did say, and why, the announcement doesn't seem like such a surprise after all. The trouble with sweeping announcements like this one is that most people learn about them in a two-line e-mail message, as a rumor on HP3000-L, or from a voice-mail message. "Hey, did you hear? HP killed the 3000! Yes—MPE/iX is finally dead. I guess we're going to have to get rid of that thing once and for all." If ever there was an announcement that deserved not to be summed up in 25 words or less, this is it. First of all, HP had not "killed" the HP e3000—in fact HP is still planning to bring one more "performance kicker" to the HP e3000 family. And MPE/iX is not "dead"—there will be another release (7.5) that will support the PA8700 processor as well as native Fibre Channel. On the other hand, HP did pin down the dates when it would finally stop selling and supporting HP e3000 systems. HP said that it will continue to sell HP e3000 A-Class and N-Class servers until Oct 31, 2003. That's just under two years of continued sales, starting from the announcement date. And, HP Support Services for the HP e3000 will continue to be available for over five years after the announcement date, until December 31, 2006. What this means is that, while there's no need to panic, there is an end in sight. You can continue to use the HP e3000 for the present. But you should start making plans for the future—plans that don't necessarily include the HP e3000. Why The HP e3000 Is Special There's no denying that for many of us, this announcement is a sad one. There's no shortage of people in the HP e3000 community who have formed an attachment to this venerable platform. Many MPE/iX customers have resisted years of pressure to move to UNIX, NT, or whatever, and there are a variety of reasons why. You could point to the HP e3000's legendary reliability and the fact that MPE/iX is so easy to use. These are both important, but they aren't enough to explain the well-documented loyalty of the HP e3000 installed base. Other systems have been just as reliable and every bit as easy to use as the HP e3000; and they went by the boards years ago. It cannot be denied that some of the HP e3000's customer loyalty is due to the fact that it was introduced nearly 30 years ago. That has given people time to build entire careers around it. We live in a time when operating systems come and go quickly. Just look at Windows 95. At barely 7 years old, Windows 95 will be entering its "non-supported phase" on December 31, 2001 (see //www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle.asp). That means that MPE/iX's support life will be over five times as long as Windows/95's. The longevity of the HP e3000 is one of the factors that has fed the loyalty of the installed base customers. The trouble is that although the HP e3000 installed base is fiercely loyal, it isn't growing. In fact, it is shrinking. As early as 1992, HP's customers had begun to show a marked preference for the company's HP-UX-based servers. There were a variety of reasons for the shift. HP undeniably played a role in it by promoting the benefits of an open operating system like HP-UX. But it didn't take long for customers to figure out that the benefits of open systems were very real. Software developers saw it too, giving UNIX customers a long list of applications to choose from, while the MPE portfolio began to shrink. In the technology arena, HP-UX assumed a leadership role. For example, TCP/IP networking was built into every HP-UX server because it was deeply integrated into the UNIX code that HP-UX was built upon. By contrast, MPE/iX was designed back in the days when networking was something new and exotic. As late as 1993, if you wanted to put your MPE/iX system on a network, you had to buy that functionality from HP. To be fair, HP fixed that inequity and bundled TCP/IP into every HP e3000 system in 1994—but for as long as HP-UX and MPE/iX have been on the market, MPE/iX has been playing "catchup" when it came to new technologies. Evolution of the Business The shift to UNIX that took place between 1992 and 2001 had a profound effect upon the HP e3000 business. The reasons for this shift had less to do with the way HP positioned HP-UX against MPE/iX, and much more to do with trends that were playing themselves out across the entire computer industry. In order to understand why HP had to make the announcement that it did on November 14, you must understand some of the background in this shift. Because of its lower entry costs, the UNIX market quickly became intensely competitive. HP found itself competing with a host of companies (Sun, IBM and DEC, just to name three) for every HP-UX sale. Consequently, HP was forced to price its HP-UX servers very aggressively. This, in turn, fueled new rounds of growth as all the UNIX vendors cut their prices in order to stay in the game. UNIX vendors (including HP) found themselves selling systems at historically low price points (at least compared to the prices that had been commanded by proprietary systems just a few years earlier). The company was able to justify the low prices because they were selling more systems than they had ever dreamed possible. The demand seemed almost bottomless. While the UNIX market was experiencing a period of explosive growth, the story in the marketplace for proprietary systems was very different. The press had been flooded with articles predicting that the proprietary model of designing and marketing systems could not survive the onslaught of low-cost UNIX-based solutions. These articles were typically brought into play in competitive sales situations. UNIX sales reps, faced with proprietary competitors, would keep these articles in their briefcases, ready to show to the customer. The argument went something like this: "A proprietary system might be more reliable. But that won't do you much good if it goes away." Across the industry, sales of proprietary systems went into a decline, even as UNIX sales skyrocketed. By the mid 1990s, virtually every hardware vendor in the industry was selling both proprietary and UNIX-based products. IBM had the proprietary AS/400, as well as the UNIX-based RS 6000. DEC had the proprietary VAX and systems running a variety of UNIX variants including OSF/1, and ULTRIX. These companies had enormous investments in their proprietary product lines. They were in no hurry to see them displaced by UNIX products, not even their own. DEC, for example, tried to position its proprietary VMS operating system as a more-stable, easier to use alternative to UNIX (a strategy that a few HP e3000 customers have said HP should have adopted). The strategy didn't work for DEC. VAX sales plummeted, and DEC was sold to Compaq in 1998. Sales of proprietary systems continued to decline until, one by one, the hardware vendors who were selling them either got out of the market, or found a way to survive in niche markets. The HP e3000 Survives By the late 1990s, HP had ceased trying to market the HP e3000 as a "general-purpose" computer. By this time, most servers were being used as file and print servers, or as general-purpose Web servers. These were not areas in which the HP e3000 could compete effectively against a low-cost UNIX box or against Microsoft's Windows/NT operating system. But the company found that there were niches in which a solution based on the HP e3000 could win. When the customer's top priority was reliability, then MPE/iX's core values still counted for something. This wasn't in the low-cost, high-volume market for file and print servers, but in the market for mission critical applications. In the late 1990s, the HP e3000 become the platform of choice for a small number of companies that specialized in mission critical applications. For example, Smith-Gardner, (today known as Ecometry) sold an MPE/iX-based application used by mail-order businesses. This evolved into the e-business application sold by Ecometry today. In the e-business world, if your server is down, you're out of business. So the HP e3000's strengths played well here. This dedicated group of mission critical application providers gave the HP e3000 a "second life" that lasted through the 1990s. The Renaissance Ends Throughout the 1990s, the HP e3000 business prospered, while most HP e3000 customers remained doggedly loyal to the platform. Although the growth of the HP e3000 installed base had stalled in the early 1990s, it did not decline significantly. But when the year 2000 got under way, HP found that its HP e3000 customers had begun deserting the platform in significant numbers. There appear to be a variety of reasons for this sea change. Perhaps the most important was that the industry had in large measure caught up with MPE/iX. Unmatched reliability and ease of use had once made MPE/iX unique. But by all accounts, today's HP-UX servers are every bit as reliable as the HP e3000. And not even MPE/iX can match the ease of use of the point-and-click environments available with Windows and Linux. By the year 2001, the HP e3000 had less that could differentiate it from HP's other server products. If there had been a ready supply of applications available for the HP e3000, the company might have been able to arrest the flow of customers away from MPE/iX. But there was another, more serious problem. When HP announced end-dates for sales and support of the HP e3000, the key reason that was given was "erosion in the ecosystem." This wasn't a reference to global warming, but to the ecology in which the HP e3000 business has thrived throughout its 30-year lifespan. HP does not support the HP e3000 business in a vacuum. Applications, accessories, development tools, support, and other essential HP e3000 products come from an "ecosystem" of HP partner companies. The software developers in this ecosystem have been gradually turning their attention toward low-cost standards-based platforms such as Linux, HP-UX, and Windows. Their customers (like HP's customers) have been moving away from proprietary platforms, and so they have had little choice but to follow them. This erosion in the HP e3000 "ecosystem" has been making it difficult for customers who want a wide choice of applications and tools that run on the HP e3000. Applications exist, but they are few. Tools exist, but there are few choices. Anyone who uses the HP e3000 on a day-to-day basis has experienced this problem, and when HP talks about erosion in the ecosystem, they are owning up to the fact that this situation is only going to get worse. Therefore, HP decided to act proactively by advising customers now to begin planning a migration to other HP platforms, before it becomes impossible to support the platform. The precise timing of the announcement was determined in part by the availability of the A-class and N-class systems, and the hardware that supports them. In 2001, HP conducted a thorough investigation of the performance requirements of HP e3000 customers. This investigation led HP to believe that the A-class and N-class systems had all the horsepower necessary to meet those requirements over the next five years. This allows HP to make the announcement from a position of strength, able to satisfy customers' performance needs right up to the last day of support for the platform. It's easy to fault HP for not putting more muscle behind the HP e3000. But if you look at the big picture of the computer industry over the past ten years, HP actually had little choice. If you look at the actions taken by those other hardware vendors who simply abandoned their proprietary platforms during the 1990s, you can see that HP really has been doing the right thing for its customers. And if you look back at the companies that did throw a lot of resources behind their proprietary systems in the 1990s, I think it's clear that HP made the right choices. Doing the Right Thing HP has a long history of trying to do the right thing for customers. Now that the decision has been made, what is the company doing for the customers who are still using the HP e3000 today? HP recognizes that most customers are not currently using A-class or N-class models of the HP e3000 running release 7.0. Most customers are using older S/9xx boxes, running older versions of MPE/iX. Therefore, HP has extended the support life of many of these older boxes (see Table 1) as well as older releases of the O/S (see Table 2). The company has also decided to offer trade-in rebates to users of older 9xx models of the HP e3000. For example, customers who are trading in a 9xx model of the HP e3000 can get aggressive discounts off of the price of new HP-UX or Intel-based servers. HP is also giving away conversion kits and unlimited HP-UX user licenses for A- and N-class customers. This means that customers who are using A-class or N-class models of the HP e3000 (or who purchase them) will be able to convert them to HP 9000s when they are ready, at zero cost. For older 9xx models, HP's recommended strategy is to use the tradeup program for new hardware, although they do sell conversion kits for some recent models of the 9x9KS server family. Conversion kits for the 929KS/030, 939KS/030, 979KS/x00, 989KS/x00, and 989KS/x50 will be orderable and shippable starting February 1, 2002. These kits can be used to convert HP e3000 servers into the corresponding K-Class HP 9000 servers. HP is providing migration services to assist the e3000 customers with their transition plans to other HP server platforms. The company is working with the third parties in the HP e3000 ecosystem to quickly develop and market a broad suite of migration tools and services so that every HP e3000 customer will be able to obtain the technical and planning assistance that they need. In addition, Hewlett-Packard's own consulting organization has stepped up to the plate to develop and deliver migration services and tools that can help even the most complex organizations make the transition. HP will be able to help customers in the following areas:
George Stachnik works in Hewlett-Packard's Commercial Systems Division in Cupertino, California. He is responsible for the development and delivery of e3000 training. |
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