Hello Friends:

The great diaspora has already begun here, people moving off to catch
planes yesterday after an uplifting week at HP World. The HP 3000 division
did some moving of its own Thursday, shuffling away from the outdated idea
that doing a lot of high-dollar work to keep Oracle on 3000s will sell any
new systems. GM Harry Sterling killed off the idea that Oracle sells 3000s
during the Management Roundtable, as tranquil an outing as I've seen since
the last HP World in San Diego seven years ago. Is it the water? The sea
breezes? Or just starting a show with Dave Barry making you belly-laugh for
more than a half hour? Whatever, it felt like 3000 users were in high
spirits here. But then, the news was good, wasn't it? Other news of the day
included a progress report on a free JDBC driver from HP in 1999 for MPE/iX
and a ship date for the Minisoft JDBC offering with a free development
environment. We also heard from new Alliance Development Manager Kriss Rant
about his quest for new blood (and rejuvenating the old) among 3000
application suppliers.

Oracle's future steady, but not growing for 3000s

Harry Sterling only had to answer a handful of questions in the two-hour
roundtable that capped our Thursday, and the first didn't appear until
almost 15 minutes into the presubmitted question period. One of his more
interesting replies echoed what he'd told us a day earlier about getting
Oracle to support Oracle8 on the 3000. Sterling said CSY would continue to
support Oracle 7.2.whatever, but he'd need a better business case for any
Oracle8 work. See, HP has been doing the porting through the 7.x series
already, and it hasn't sold many new 3000s. (In case you're wondering,
that's a task dear to Sterling's heart.) We already know Oracle hasn't
delivered the glut of applications CSY hoped for, either.

Oracle is committed to supporting the 7.2.whatever release "as long as we
need that to happen," Sterling said. "The reality of Oracle is that it has
not been a huge opportunity for new business on the 3000. It's not to say
that a lot of customers aren't using it. But we're seeing our largest
vertical market growth areas with very strong applications that are written
on IMAGE. Those are the areas where we are currently focusing our
attention, because that's where we're getting a lot of new business for the
platform and that keeps us healthy in the long run."

JDBC a-plenty for 3000s

We heard about no less than four JDBC offerings for the HP 3000 here at the
show, but only saw two demos first-hand. The first was in the Minisoft
booth, where Steve Chappel showed off the company's JDBC middleware
package, now in documentation/tutorial-writing mode with product ship set
for October. "We built an integrated development environment for Java,"
Chappel said, talking about a design environment that Minisoft will give
away with the purchase of the JDBC driver "just to get people into the Java
world." The driver will be priced the same as ODBC/32, $1,995 with
unlimited user licenses.

The development environment, FMJavelin, is based on FrontMan, "but we
stripped out all the other stuff and made a Java tool out of it so it
generates Java code." Sample projects showed GUI-based form layout tools as
well as an option to automatically build forms by just pointing them a
databases. The product can create either Java applications or Java applets,
once you have the Java Development kit installed from HP in the 6.0 MPE/iX
release.

HP's driver will rely on the same Allbase/SQL underpinning as its
ODBCLinkSE driver, meaning that native TurboIMAGE access through JDBC will
have to come from a third party. HP's driver will be an all-Java
implementation, as will Minisoft's. But the Minisoft product will keep you
from having to joust with Allbase DBEs for your TurboIMAGE databases.

The players in the ODBC derby appear to have retained their basic posts in
the JDBC heat. HP continues to rely on Allbase/SQL and offers standalone
middleware. Minisoft offers a native-access standalone tool. MB Foster
reports it will offer by October JDBC services, but bundled inside
DataExpress just as it has for ODBCLink. And we heard that CSL Solutions in
the UK is also readying a standalone JDBC offering.

There really is a Series I out there

A mis-named file kept us from showing the Series I on the show floor at the
NewsWire's FreeNews site, http://www.3000newswire.com/newswire If you now
browse to http://www.3000newswire.com/newswire/Series1.jpg you really can
see the photo that the machine posed for. Really.

Rant looks for tool and application points

Former MPE product manager Kriss Rant told us about his new job as Alliance
Development Manager for CSY. One of his first steps will be to find
middleware and system management packages to round out the airline, credit
union, direct mail, healthcare and manufacturing application focus HP
announced in mid-July. (We noted earlier this week that Amisys came out
strong for IA-64, after some PR scheduling had kept them out of the
original IA-64 release press kit. Not much of a surprise considering
Amisys' Frank Kelly's advocacy for greater than 4Gb file sizes two years
ago.)

"We're focused on five verticals," Rant said, "and the way I'm going to
approach this is that there are still some elements of the solution that
are missing -- middleware packages, system management packages or modules
that could round out these applications we have. Or there could be other
manufacturing applications that might offer a richer offering in the
midrange manufacturing area. I'll be taking a look at what ISVs we have out
there today. Rant thinks the recent growth in the 3000 business can be a
catalyst to getting dormant ISVs working on the platform again.

Rant thinks there's still some more value that can be added to HP's
Software Partnership Provider's program (SPP) to help out ISVs for 3000s.
More hardware, software or consulting services are early ideas he's got to
help make ISVs successful. SPP membership is a prerequisite to buying a
Series 918DX Developer's 3000.

New products on the floor

For a lot of attendees, Thursday was the last day to look over demos and
shop as the show floor closed at 3. We found a few items of note both on
the floor and off. Speedware showed us a slick demo of their Visual
Speedware product that combines the power of Visual Basic with native
access to HP 3000 resources and databases. It's been shipping and installed
for months, and lets VB developers do work for 3000s or 3000-centric
programmers get going quick on VB concepts. Two or three-tier architectures
are supported. We'll have more details in a later issue.

We also encountered SIGIMAGE Executive Committee member and SIG-UIF/VPLUS
Gary Biggs outside sessions talking up Enigme, his new GUI-capable VPLUS
API. It gives VPLUS apps a modern look and feel, doing a just-in-time
presentation of VPLUS code to add pull down menus, tool bars, dialog boxes,
context-sensitive help and scrolling values lists. He said that unmodified
native mode applications that perform direct FREADs and FWRITEs can use the
technology. Look for more details on his web site, www.enigme.dallas.tx.us,
in mid-month.

There's more, of course, but today's Database Management Roundtable
beckons. NewsWire subscribers can look for deeper reports in their
mailboxes today, and more news in the September issue of the NewsWire and
the August FlashPaper. Thanks for the bandwidth this week!






Ron Seybold, Editor In Chief
The 3000 NewsWire
Independent Information to Maximize Your HP 3000
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512.331.0075