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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