Carol asks:

> How does one achieve the synergies and the resilience that comes from the
>  interaction and inter-dependencies of Image, Transact, Adager, MPEX, etc in
>  ANY other environment????  Oh my, retirement is not close enoough!

As to extending the life of your HP3000 out past your retirement date (which
is not an unrealistic point of view), from my discussions with our customer
base, I've come to these estimates:

     o Approx. 5 to 15% of the current base will take HP's advice and begin
migrating their applications to HP-UX.

     o Approx. 10 to 15% of the current base is supported by an active ISV
applications vendor and will do whatever their ISV tells them to do. These
people lead the most sheltered lives and tend to trust their ISVs.

     o Approx. 20 to 40% are planning on migrating their applications to any
vendor other than HP, their anger being sufficiently high enough to swear off
anything HP for at least the near-term.

     o Approx. 20 to 50% of current users appear to be planning to do nothing
at all, except perhaps stockpile additional HP3000 hardware in a year or two,
when the line comes near the end of its sales. These customers tend to those
who have a very heavy investment in locally developed software, or are those
who are beginning to realize what their migration costs are going to be.

Some of these latter customers are either planning on "holding on" until the
end of life of their companies, which may only be 5 to 20 years out, but most
are simply stalling, looking for a sufficiently similar applications package,
on any platform, to what they now run that they can buy and just move over
to. This option is enormously cheaper and more certain for them than any sort
of "migration". By doing this, they will obtain a fully supported product
that has most of the bumps and hiccups already smoothed out of it, at a
fraction of the cost of actually migrating their current applications to a
new platform.

Of interest, virtually every organization that I've spoken to in this final
category would stay with MPE indefinitely, should a reasonable performance
emulator appear.

Wirt Atmar

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