Hi - I am interested in hearing from anybody who has experience porting a
HP 3000 application to Unix.
 
We sell a very large system that handles Managed Health care membership and
billing, to HMO health insurance organizations.  We are doing well with our
product, but increasingly, the HMO's want to buy Unix, not 3000.  We love
the 3000, so do our current customers.  We tell everyone that will listen
that the 3k is THE way to go, but we have decided that no matter how good
the 3k is, we have to start supporting the 9k as an additional platform,
because that is what the market is demanding.  Of course, we will also
continue supporting the HP 3000.
 
Our product currently uses 1200 PowerHouse Quick screens (600,000 lines of
code) and over 1.3 million lines of COBOL, to access about 500 TurboIMAGE
data sets.  Realy big application, hate to re-write it.
 
We would like to move to relational, because that is also what a lot of the
new customers are demanding (even though IMAGE works great for our product).
 
We would also like to save as much of the current product as possible,
 ie: port the Quick screens to Unix (runs on 3k & 9k, portable),
     convert the HP 3000 COBOL to MicroFocus COBOL  (runs on 3k & 9k, portable)
     convert the TurboIMAGE data to ORACLE (runs on 3k & 9k, portable)
     etc.  -But - maybe a total re-write with 1990's tools is best?
 
 
Does anybody have experience with ORACLE on the 3000?
Can anybody compare the performance/features of Oracle on 3k vs 9k?
Does anybody have any experience converting HP COBOL to MF COBOL?
Anybody think porting our application to Oracle is a good idea?
   -or- is relational too different from IMAGE, such that a
        conversion from IMAGE to relational is a waste of time
        maybe it is better to re-write the whole application?
 
There are companies supplying conversion services, IDSI, IISI, DB-NET,
etc....  Does anybody have experience with one of these vendors?
These vendors usually provide a call conversion library that converts IMAGE
calls to ORACLE/SYBASE...   Anybody know if this performs well?
 
If anybody would please respond with their experiences, we would be very
grateful.... either through the listserver or e-mail to me... Thanks!
 
Rich
Rich Roemer                    | AIH Systems Inc.
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w phone (301) 738-7305         | Rockville MD 20832
w fax   (301) 251-2925         |