Duane Percox wrote:
>
> Ken (in a definite state of grrrr'ness) said:
>
> >Duane, Birket, and Svein all posted on this subject:
> >
> >>>Duane - Last summer I was on a roundtable in Stuttgart. One of the
> >>>panelists was from a company that had implemented the first copy of SAP on
> >>>an HP3000. SAP and HP came to his company and cancelled their plans for
> >>>rolling out SAP on 130+ sites round the world. HP paid for UNIX training
> >>>and a sweet deal on the 130 Unix boxes to replace the HP3000's.
> >
> >>This is a good example of HP doing some anti-recruiting ;-(
> >
> >>It sure would be good to hear what HP has to say about this. From this
> >>discription it looks like HP/SAP had an agenda and the 3000 wasn't on it.
> >
> >Grrrrrr......  Note especially from above by Birket a key phrase:
> >
> >".....a company that had implemented the first copy of SAP on
> >an HP3000";  i.e.:  past tense....  HP should be trying to bring
> >*more* world-class applications to the 3000;  and here they
> >are getting rid of a major package *THAT WAS ALREADY
> >RUNNING* ?!?!.  Perceived lack of strategic support for the
> >3000 at the HP corporate level is bad enough, but this sounds
> >like deliberate, active DE-marketing to a customer that *wanted*
> >to stay on the 3000 (since from everything I hear implementing
> >SAP on any platform is non-trivial, I assume this company didn't
> >go through the implementation exercise just for the fun of it)......
> >
> >Like I said,  grrrrrr....  :-((
>
> I would like to rein this in just a little. I had the same response as Ken
> does here (grrrrrrr) when I heard this story and it difinitely does raise
> some key issues.
>
> However, I have received some correspondence which suggests there may have
> been some good business reasons for SAP to not want to support the 3000 at
> that time. In summary, without going into too much detail, this is what
> I've been advised:
>
> 1. there were performance issues on the 3000 due to the nature of the
>    SAP application code (fork performance and character i/o)
>
> 2. HP did in fact help iron out and improve upon these issues, but SAP
>    ended up with a not so standard code base because of application
>    changes they needed to make.
>
> 3. SAP didn't want to support the additional version aimed at just one
>    platform (3000).
>
> I would say that unless you were intimately involved in these issues and
> the decision making tree you probably can't really know what was going
> on and what the true motivations were. However, its possible that HP didn't
> have the final say here and it was finally a SAP decision which was supported
> by HP to keep the business.
>
> Duane Percox  (QSS)
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Yes, that's basically the story. As SAP has not seen the big numbers of
sells as on the U**X side, SAP decided to stop any further development
for "niche" systems like MPE/iX (and VMS) and fully focus on U**X and NT
as their strategic development platforms. For SAP R/3 on AS/400 you
should ask who is paying for this and who is doing this...
 
Ivica Juresa
HP CSY Marketing Europe