Hello Friends:

Since this is a discussion about MPE/iX and its comparative suitability to
today's releases of Windows NT, I think it's important to keep focused on
what's really being discussed. The issue isn't sales success, it's
productivity in mission-critical environments.

Mike Hornsby's comments on NT use -- "I don't know of a single site that is
using NT for core business applications. Of the ones that do use NT, they
are only used as a file and print servers" -- track very accurately with
the reports we get from customers, consultants and resellers in the HP 3000
community while we work on NewsWire articles. Many HP 3000 sites are using
Windows NT as a replacement for Novell's Netware. Having succeeded in this,
they now want to see what else NT can do.

Some of those companies, including some manufacturers who have relied on HP
3000s up to now, have it in their minds that NT can bring applications and
feature support which these companies need from their current MPE/iX
solutions. Applications are a catch-up point today for HP 3000 customers in
some sectors, and manufacturing can be one of those sectors. I know of one
company where the MIS director is implementing an SAP NT solution -- or
more accurately, looking for ways to avoid this, since the fellow knows
that NT doesn't have the 25 years of maturity and stability the HP 3000
counts on. He's counted on that stability, too. Nothing that's six years
old will have the durability of a solution that's performed more than four
times as long, surviving all fads while embracing all new technologies.

NT is a good solution in some places in an enterprise, by many accounts
from our readers. The less daunted ones are using NT as an e-mail solution,
relying on Microsoft's Exchange or putting PC-based solutions on the NT
boxes. Mail is a mission-critical application in many companies, but they
are also used to unscheduled outages in e-mail. America Online's woes seem
to have accustomed us all to mail interruptions, if the US Postal Service
hadn't done that already.

It's important to remember two things about NT versus its more accomplished
cousin in the HP solutions family, MPE/iX:

1. NT's millions may not matter against MPE's thousands. Not every NT
system sold is doing the kind of transaction-heavy, months-of-uptime
service that HP 3000s do everyday. In contrast, only the development
systems in the HP 3000 installations aren't doing that kind of service. I
believe this absence of proof of mission-critical reliability is what
prompted Computerworld to caution readers about NT 5.0.

2. Things that sell by the millions don't always yield their expected
results. Many millions of copies of NT have sold, yes. The same can be said
about the Unix systems NT is now replacing. Denys' comments about
installing NT on high-grade hardware -- like HP's offerings from the
Enterprise NetServer Operation -- are vital to giving NT an outside shot at
mission-critical application work. NT's lure, however, is the affordability
of the hardware. That leads NT implementers to cut corners on cost. Don't
do it. If you can't afford the same kind of never-break hardware like the
HP 3000, better buy lots of spares, design with redundant systems and keep
people on hand to swap parts out.

Besides, millions sold doesn't imply a successful solution. America Online
has millions of customers, but finding even a majority that are truly happy
with the service could be quite a challenge. Interesting note: AOL no
longer will answer questions on what kind of computers it uses, but when
they did talk about this in 1996 they were using HP 9000 systems. It would
appear there are some "complexity of scalability" issues to be resolved at
AOL -- something that the million-selling Unix solution never presented as
a potential problem while HP sold it as a mainframe alternative.


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