Terry writes:
> I have been listening lately.

A lot of us have been listening to a lot of customers lately I think.

> My one HP3000 client hired some CPA's to do
> an analysis of what to do with 5 year TOC and various risks associated
> with it.  They were looking at the following scenarios:
>
> 1.  Homestead
> 2.  Migrate code to Psuedo MPE
> 3.  Rewrite from Scratch
> 4.  Rewrite after Migrate
> 5.  Package Solution with changes
>
> Homesteading was the least risky and the least costly while the Package
> solution was the most risky and the most costly.

I'm not surprised that Homesteading came out #1, though I'm somewhat
surprised that, even after investigation, a "Package Solution" wasn't higher
on the list.  For customers where a quality 3rd party vertical application
exists (on any platform) that is at least a reasonable fit for their
business, I think it's going to be the way that most customers eventually
go.  Obviously if there's nothing out there that's even close to how you run
your business, or the only realistic option is something like SAP which may
be totally unacceptable for cost and complexity reasons, they it's not
really an option at all.

> They would choose homesteading if they felt that Homesteading was a
> longterm solution.  At the moment they are leaning towards Migrate to a
> Psuedo MPE environment but probably not until after 2006.

After listening to customers over the last few months, I now believe that
80% (+/- 10%) of existing MPE users will be "homesteading" in that they will
still be using their 3000s in production in 2007, past when HP (currently)
plans to drop support for (most of) their customers.

But for most people it *isn't* a long term solution.  Ultimately most will
move to something else, but many will do it only because they're forced to
by changes in their business or because they can't afford to keep the 3000
running any more.  Quite a few (many of the smaller customers) will finally
make the transition catastrophically when the 3000 dies and can't be
resurrected, or the backup tapes can't be read, or it turns out that the
last backup was done in 1995 :-)

G.