Kriss Rant wrote:
>
> My name is Kriss Rant, and I work in product marketing for the
> HP 3000.
>
> We would like to understand your future business requirements
> in the area of application and database environments.Kriss,
 I have been a consultant for a major manufacturer in the Detroit
area for over 5 years.  I do the technical support of a HP3000 application.
We have over 50 HP3000 Series 70s.  We have just started migrating to
HP3000 928.  We will do a one for one swap.  We started to attempt
to move to these new systems before I got here 5 years ago.  The
arrangement of power in the company prevented a reinvestment.
We had a distributed costs which were higher than the costs
would have been if we centralized (IMHO).  Only by allowing
some of the sites to purchase without the others commiting
were we able to break the roadblock (at first we wished to avoid
a mixed environment - all or none).
  In a department meeting this week the department manager
was asked what we will be doing with these newer HP systems.
He replyed that he would like to get rid of them.  I his mind
(and I am speaking for him so I may be wrong here) he thinks
of the systems as closed.  He did say we can reuse some of the
equipment (he has been told we can board swap the HP 928
to make it a HP9000 - good move HP!).
  My future business need and database requrement is to
teach those around me that we have an open system.
I would like to suggest that HP can assist me with this
by including some verbage in the, what shall I call it,
"mangement level advertisments" that states that HP
can show them how to use an HP3000 as a database server.
  I can visualize an HP3000 Image database with an ODBC
middleware and a state of the art front end.  Can you?
  So now how can we move our application's business rules
from a closed environment (we use the programing lanuage
called Transact and thats C-L-O-S-E-D) to an open
middleware solution? Perhaps that can be provided.