This summer HP exhibited a new tool to collect and analyze ITIL-based metrics. HP DecisionCenter is software that includes the HP Financial Planning and Analysis (HP FP&A). HP bills this software as a tool to help "CIOs take action to reduce variances between planned and actual spending, optimize underutilized assets and accurately allocate IT costs to the consumers of IT services."

When an enterprise grows beyond midrange size, these kinds of issues become as important to a company's top management as reliable backups are to the datacenter manager. The FP&A software links combines a financial planning and analysis capability to a financial data model. It consolidates financial information from project, asset and configuration management systems, as well as ERP software.

This kind of analysis might be familiar to an HP 3000 owner who plumbed the depths of data processing to track performance of a system. ITIL concepts such as Application Portfolio Management can be tracked using a dashboard like the one above that HP says helps "tackle the traditionally high cost of IT."

HP reports that when 200 "IT leaders" were surveyed recently, "nearly half... said they lack investment rigor and have no form of portfolio management in place for aligning IT investment decisions to business priorities." The vendor is offering an IT Performance Analytics module for HP DecisionCenter to assist in this kind of tracking. If a 3000 operation is headed into a larger data enterprise, such as through an acquisition, then ITIL, APM and analysis of investment decisions will become new skills to polish.

DecisionCenter is an analytics suite, an ITIL v3-aligned tool that enables users to "target business priorities and drive process health by discovering bottlenecks and inefficiencies." This tool can be predictive -- you can train it upon a solution your company hasn't adopted, for what-if scenario analysis  to allow IT and business decision makers to model the impact of changes in SLAs, funding, or risk tolerances. Nothing can take the place of pilot projects, rigorous testing or user interviews to learn what solution might replace a 3000. But even as you embark on that task, measuring your business IT goals against financial models provides a clearer picture.

1:  Boolean function syntax, so I could say :if  holiday()  then instead of
:xeq datetest
:if WhichVariableName = DontRememberWhatValue then

and also because I just think user-functions are cool."

"2. Much easier to add or disable specific holidays according to site-specific policies or even other countries’ rules. (Then disable Veterans Day, Presidents Day and MLK Day, because my company doesn’t take them.)

"3. Make it easy to add special one-off holidays like the day before/after Christmas at the last minute when the company announces them.

"Along the way, I also added midnight-protection and partial input date-checking, and made it more readable, at least to me."

Powell, who's contributed plenty of command files to the community through the HP 3000 newsgroup, says that most of the fun came in the day-of-week calculation.

I didn’t understand that part of Tracy’s script, or trust myself to adapt it without messing up, so I found a second method and used both, with a warning if the results didn’t agree. Surprise, surprise, they disagree about 12/25/2100, although they agree on dates I tested within the expected lifespan of MPE. So I shoveled in a third formula and found a day-of-week calculator spreadsheet, both of which agree with the second method. So anyone who uses Tracy’s original command file and plans to still run it in 2100 might need to make a change.

He offered what he called a preliminary version of the new datetest, which has been checked by Allegro's Steve Cooper.

option nolist
parm CCYYMMDD    =   ""
if   bound (HOL_ERRORS)    or    bound (HOL_DAY)
    deletevar   HOL_@
endif
setvar   HOL_ERRORS  0
if   "!CCYYMMDD"     =   ""
    setvar  HOL_CYMD    HPYYYYMMDD
    setvar  HOL_DAY     !HPDAY
    if  HOL_CYMD        <>  HPYYYYMMDD
#            if the date has changed, we just hit midnite and the
#            day-of-week we just set might be the new day; in this
#            case set the date & day-of-week again, and we should
#            be ok (unless the following 2 commands take 24 hours :)
        setvar  HOL_CYMD    HPYYYYMMDD
        setvar  HOL_DAY     !HPDAY
    endif
else
    setvar  HOL_CYMD    "!CCYYMMDD"
    if  not numeric (HOL_CYMD)
        echo **date parm, if entered, must be numeric**
        setvar  HOL_ERRORS  HOL_ERRORS + 1
    endif
    if  len (HOL_CYMD)   <>  8
        echo **date parm must be exactly 8 digits, unless omitted**
        setvar  HOL_ERRORS  HOL_ERRORS + 1
    elseif  numeric (HOL_CYMD)
        if  rht (HOL_CYMD, 2) > "31"
            echo **last 2 digits of date parm can't be more than 31**
            setvar  HOL_ERRORS  HOL_ERRORS + 1
        elseif  rht (HOL_CYMD, 2) = "00"
            echo **last 2 digits of date parm can't be "00"**
            setvar  HOL_ERRORS  HOL_ERRORS + 1
        endif
        if  str (HOL_CYMD, 5, 2) > "12"
            echo **bytes 5 & 6 of date parm can't be more than 12**
            setvar  HOL_ERRORS  HOL_ERRORS + 1
        elseif  str (HOL_CYMD, 5, 2) = "00"
            echo **characters 5 & 6 of date parm can't be "00"**
            setvar  HOL_ERRORS  HOL_ERRORS + 1
        endif
    endif
    if  HOL_ERRORS      >   0
        echo **exiting because the date-parm was not a valid**
        echo **8-digit date in yyyymmdd format **
        return FALSE
    endif
endif

#    -------------------------------------------------------
#    do not casually modify above here
#
#    Take any special / unofficial holidays here
#    OK to replace any dates that are past with the date of a
#    holiday the company just announced (Jewish new year,
#    days before / after Christmas & New Years, etc, etc)

if   HOL_CYMD="20080929"  or  HOL_CYMD="20081008" &
or   HOL_CYMD="20081226"  or  HOL_CYMD="20090102"
    echo It's a special company holiday :)
    return  TRUE
endif

#    do not casually modify below here
#    -------------------------------------------------------

setvar   HOL_YYYY    str (HOL_CYMD, 1, 4)
setvar   HOL_MM      str (HOL_CYMD, 5, 2)
setvar   HOL_DD      str (HOL_CYMD, 7, 2)

#
#    Set day of week, unless already set because processing "today"
#
if   not     bound (HOL_DAY)
#    1st, the method in the original "datetest" command file
    setvar  HOL_DAY str("000031059090120151181212243273304334", &
            !HOL_MM * 3 - 2, 3)
    setvar  HOL_DAY     !HOL_DAY + !HOL_DD
    IF  !HOL_MM > 2    and   ( !HOL_YYYY / 4 * 4 = !HOL_YYYY )
        setvar  HOL_DAY      HOL_DAY + 1
    ENDIF
    setvar  HOL_YWK     !HOL_YYYY - 1
    setvar  HOL_DAY     !HOL_DAY + ( !HOL_YWK / 400 ) * 146097
    setvar  HOL_YWK     !HOL_YWK  mod  400
    setvar  HOL_DAY     !HOL_DAY - ( !HOL_YWK / 100 ) * 36524
    setvar  HOL_YWK     !HOL_YWK mod 100
    setvar  HOL_DAY     !HOL_DAY + ( !HOL_YWK / 4 ) * 1461
    setvar  HOL_YWK     !HOL_YWK mod 4
    setvar  HOL_DAY     !HOL_DAY + ( !HOL_YWK * 365 )
    setvar  HOL_DAY     ( HOL_DAY mod 7 ) + 1
    deletevar HOL_YWK

#    Next, the method posted to the 3000-l by Mike Hornsby 06/04/2004
#    except, add 1 at the end because his was 0-6 and we need
#    1-7.
    setvar  HOL_XYR !HOL_YYYY-((12-!HOL_MM)/10)
    setvar  HOL_XMONTH !HOL_MM+(((12-!HOL_MM)/10)*12)
    setvar  HOL_XDAY !HOL_DD+(!HOL_XMONTH*2)+(((!HOL_XMONTH+1)*6)/10)
    setvar  HOL_XLEAP_YR (HOL_XYR/4) - (HOL_XYR/100) + (HOL_XYR/400)
    setvar  HOL_XDAY (HOL_XDAY+HOL_XYR+HOL_XLEAP_YR+1) mod 7  +  1

#    Next, day-of-week with my adaption of a "Zeller" formula
#    off the internet.
    if  HOL_MM      <   "03"
        setvar  HOL_ZMONTH  !HOL_MM  +  12
        setvar  HOL_ZYEAR   !HOL_YYYY   -   1
    else
        setvar  HOL_ZMONTH  !HOL_MM
        setvar  HOL_ZYEAR   !HOL_YYYY
    endif
    setvar  HOL_ZDAY    ( &
        ((13 * HOL_ZMONTH + 3) / 5)  +  !HOL_DD  +  HOL_ZYEAR &
    +   (HOL_ZYEAR/4) - (HOL_ZYEAR/100) + (HOL_ZYEAR/400) &
    +   1 )     mod 7   +   1

#    Now, see if the day-of-week calcs agree
    if  HOL_DAY     <>  HOL_XDAY &
    or  HOL_DAY     <>  HOL_ZDAY &
    or  HOL_ZDAY    <>  HOL_XDAY
        setvar  HOL_ERRORS  HOL_ERRORS + 1
        echo **day-of-week error**
        echo    HOL_DAY   =   !HOL_DAY
        echo    HOL_XDAY  =   !HOL_XDAY
        echo    HOL_ZDAY  =   !HOL_ZDAY
    endif
    setvar  HOL_DAY     HOL_ZDAY
    deletevar   HOL_X@,  HOL_Z@
ENDIF

#
#    Now check for specific regular holidays, month-by-month.
if   HOL_MM  =   "01"
    if  HOL_DD  =   "01"
        echo It's New Years Day
        return  TRUE
    endif
    if  ( !HOL_DAY=2  and  !HOL_DD>=15  and  !HOL_DD<=21 )
        echo (It's Martin Luther King day - but do we get it?)
#        return  TRUE
    endif
    return  FALSE
elseif   HOL_MM  =   "02"
    if  (!HOL_DAY=2  and  !HOL_DD>=15  and  !HOL_DD<=21)
        echo (It's President's Day - but do we get it?)
#        return  TRUE
    endif
    return  FALSE
elseif   HOL_MM  =   "05"
    if  (!HOL_DAY=2  and  !HOL_DD>=25  and  !HOL_DD<=31)
        echo It's Memorial Day
        return  TRUE
    endif
    return  FALSE
elseif   HOL_MM  =   "07"
    if  HOL_DD  =   "04"
        echo It's July 4th
        return  TRUE
    endif
    return  FALSE
elseif   HOL_MM  =   "09"
    if  ( !HOL_DAY=2  and  !HOL_DD>=1  and  !HOL_DD<=7 )
        echo It's Labor Day
        return  TRUE
    endif
    return  FALSE
elseif   HOL_MM  =   "11"
    if  HOL_DD  =   "11"
        echo (it's Veterans Day - but do we get it ?)
#        return  TRUE
    endif
    if  ( !HOL_DAY=5  and  !HOL_DD>=22  and  !HOL_DD<=28 )
        echo It's Thanksgiving
        return  TRUE
    endif
    if  ( !HOL_DAY=6  and  !HOL_DD>=23  and  !HOL_DD<=29 )
        echo It's the day after Thanksgiving
        return  TRUE
    endif
    return  FALSE
elseif   HOL_MM  =   "12"
    if  HOL_DD  =   "25"
        echo It's Christmas
        return  TRUE
    endif
    return  FALSE
endif

# showvar  HOL_@
return   FALSE
#    Function "holiday" to return 'TRUE' on company holidays
#    Dave Powell,    MMfab, Inc              05/12/2009
#
#    Syntax  if   holiday ()  then       <checks today>
#            calc holiday (20090511)
#            if   holiday ("20090511")   then
#            calc holiday (SomeDateVariable)
#            etc
#            or, for a company that sometimes has a few people in
#            Saturday morning, but its not like a real workday
#            setvar  OFFDAY    HOLIDAY()  or  HPDAY=1
#            setvar  WORKDAY   HPDAY<7  and  not OFFDAY
#            setvar  MAYBEDAY  not ( OFFDAY or WORKDAY )
#            etc
#
#    Logic adapted from the "datetest" command file
#    posted by Tracy Pierce on the HP-3000L on 09/26/2002
#
#    Variable-naming convention:
#    -   'DD', "MM",  "YYYY" etc mean string variables with the
#        length you might guess from the name.
#    -   'DAY', "YEAR", "MONTH" mean integer-type variables.
#
#    Changes / "improvements" in this file over original "datetest"
#    -   Function syntax, so you can say
#            if holiday() then
#        instead of
#            xeq datetest
#            if IForgetTheVariableName = WhatWasThatValue then
#    -   Separate "if"s for each holiday, to make it easier to
#        turn them on or off depending on your site's policies.
#    -   Then turns off some holidays I don't I think I can
#        count on MMfab always taking.
#    -   It echoes the name of whatever holiday it thinks it is,
#        do make debugging easier.
#    -   Has a spot to put in extra / unofficial days off when
#        the company announces them (like the day before / after
#        Christmas).
#    -   Returns true if the holiday falls on a Saturday or Sunday,
#        except Easter Sunday, which is ugly.
#    -   Midnite protection.
#    -   Checks that the date is numeric, with plausible month & day
#        (does not check that the day is too high for that month)
#    -   More readable ?
#    -   Calculates day-of-week three ways and compares them, as an
#        extra double-check since I don't understand any of
#        these calculations   :(
#    Downgrades:
#    -   Won't try to guess the century -- cannot handle 6-digit
#        input.
#
#
#    Any errors return "FALSE" on the assumption that the programmer,
#    at least, can't take a holiday until he fixes the bug  :)
#
#
#    Day-of-Week note:
#    The 3 methods mostly agree, but 12-25-2100 is a Sunday
#    according to method 1, but a Saturday according to methods
#    2 & 3.  Babwani's modified 2007 date-calc spreadsheet also
#    says Saturday.

The document was HP's first shot into an open sky of communications to HP 3000 users of 1975. June of that year might have been the first summer that HP wanted to share updates about the HP 3000, since the computer had passed through the end of '74 and gotten into summer of '75 with consistent reports of reliability. Issue 1 of the Computer Systems Communicator included a section on the HP 2000 systems as well as the HP 9600 Measurement and Control systems. HP considered the three computers a complete solution to data processing needs of the middle '70s.

Only one of these computer systems has survived into this century, and HP identifies some of the credit for the 3000's longevity in this Communicator's contents: user groups, the first Communicator's theme. A HP 3000 user group was introduced with a board of directors and a mandate for meetings: "The meetings, open to all group members, afford an excellent forum for the exchange new techniques and ideas."

This Communicator also advised 3000 users about "Steps to Produce a Core Dump Tape" as well as an update to a bedrock program still used by every HP 3000 database today, FCOPY.

At 32 loose-leaf pages, the June 15, 1975 Communicator is a fledgling document. There was a good reason that the new HP 3000 Users Group met four times over 1974-75. 3000 technology was quick to change on this new HP business computer, and printed advice couldn't cover what a good talk could in person. Through 1975, two meetings were held in Palo Alto and one each in Chicago and Miami.

HP was also happy to report success for a customer who'd completed an HP 3000 internals course in this issue. "ESL in Sunnyvale, California is involved with various government agencies who as customers demand highly sophisticated applications, some of which are photographic image processing and display and land usage plottage." ESL was writing its own IO drivers and "saw a need for greater understanding of the internal activities of MPE." HP included a contact if customers wanted similar training.

To this day the Communicator continues to hold the internal advice from HP's labs to its more ardent 3000 homesteaders. HP is still making these documents available to the world from its docs.hp.com Web pages. The history there goes back more than 21 summers ago, to the Communicator issue that HP first sent out in 1988 with its groundbreaking PA-RISC MPE/XL 1.0 systems.

The final Communicator, issued one summer ago for MPE/iX 7.5 PowerPatch 5, features a pair of technical articles on IO options that might still be new to 3000 owners. Jim Hawkins, one of the last members of HP's 3000 labs, wrote pieces on High Availability FailOver/iX for FiberChannel Disk Arrays and Limited Support for Ultrium Tape on MPE/iX. A listing of beta test patches, and MPE support details for those arrays aren't available on an HP Web site any longer. (The 3000 community has several experts who can guide customers through installing the high-end arrays; Craig Lalley of EchoTech is the first who comes to mind.) Client Systems has posted a selection of HP labs whitepapers on its rehosted Jazz Web site.

Although the newspaper business is embroiled in change this year, a leading daily paper for the Twin Cities is still using software developed for the HP 3000. An advertising system which was sold off-the-shelf by Collier-Jackson continues to track the paper's subscriptions and newsstand sales.

Linda Roatch, a former HP user group director, checked in and reported on the 3000's status. "We do have a 3000 in house that still runs our circulation system," Roatch said. "I'm the Advertising Systems Manager. I'm not involved with the 3000, but I believe it's the Collier-Jackson circulation system from long ago, one that we've highly customized and haven't upgraded in years."

Newspapers represented a healthy market for the HP 3000 in the decade that led to HP's exit announcement. Collier-Jackson was a newspaper software vendor once large enough to mount its own user group conference, a meeting of several days during that decade. Collier-Jackson was sold in 1994 from Compuserve to GEAC, a Canadian company which was acquired by ERP and business software vendor Infor. Infor has made acquiring legacy software a business mantra.

An application bought off the shelf and fine-tuned for a business's processes is a classic element in 3000 homesteading. ERP users operate in the same kind of shop, customizing apps such as MANMAN or MM II/eXegysys to adapt to business changes. Infor owns MANMAN as well as the Collier-Jackson assets.

Roatch did duty on the Interex user group board and worked as an independent consultant from her Minnesota base. She says she's moved on to working with Sun and Oracle in another section of the paper, which recently laid off nine more employees from its 138-person newsroom. It's a struggling business like so many other newspapers, but it's holding its own while it holds onto its HP 3000.

"I'm responsible for the project management, support and development of software used by Advertising," Roatch said. "I've not worked on the HP 3000 for almost four years. The software I support runs on Sun servers and an Oracle DB, and I'm pretty removed from the hardware and database support stuff."

There's more than one level of experimenting going on here. HP's trying to see what might stick to your budget. Cloud computing is a new term, one being applied to the yeoman work during this tough year's IT sales missions. But cloud computing might be an alternative to HP 3000 ownership if 1. Applications can be found in the cloud to enable a customer's services to its business centers. 2. These applications can be customized to fit company business processes, and 3. The whole solution is as reliable as maintaining your own datacenter.

Reliability is a key to replicating the 3000 value. The HPTF attendee above isn't looking into the clouds for an enterprise solution. He's looking over the ceiling of an HP product that's as non-cloudy as anything can be, but built by the vendor to deliver "Cloud Assurance."

The IT community that prizes HP 3000 experience knows that clouds can disappear for awhile. Everything goes down. Last week one of the most adept of cloud computing providers, Google, saw its services evaporate for millions of users of Google Code, when the Google App Engine went offline. The event of a few hours' outage made a case for the very non-cloudy HP offering, the HP POD. Unlike the cloud, the Performance-Optimized Datacenter is delivered not over a network, but packed in a 40-foot commercial storage container. HP will drop one at your request, overnight.

The POD made a tour stop at the HPTF, where a helpful HP rep offered a slide show that serves as a virtual tour. The POD, explained in plain English, looks like a Datacenter of Impressive Size (DIS) filled top to bottom with server racks and extensive cooling. That's capacity for over 3,500 compute nodes, or 12,000 hot plug hard drives, or a combination thereof. If your local school district is out of classroom space, it might use portable buildings to supplement. POD appears to be the container-based portable building for an datacenter, expanding capacity 4,000 square feet at a time.

For the customer who's lost power, the POD solution can be coupled with a Powerhouse POD. (A Powerhouse not related in any way to the 3000 software company, since it's a massive hunk of hardware instead of a massive hunk of software and license fees.)

These two ends of HP's enterprise spectrum — on one hand, resources you cannot even see; on the other, a solution so large its delivery requires a flatbed tractor-trailer — shows HP casting a wide net. This month the HP Cloud Discovery Workshop debuts, a service to educate you about how cloud computing fits in an IT service provider strategy.

The POD feels more like the HP 3000 datacenter. But HP calls the POD "cloud-enabling computing." By any name, using offsite resources becomes very popular in an economy where few new purchases of capital goods can get approval. Much like the HP 3000, a POD becomes the heavy hardware to make HP promises of services come true. HP wants to offer infrastructure, platforms, as well as software, all as services. Clouds become the ultimate HP virtualization trick, enabled by hardware engineered to be redundant.

I also believe that independence is essential to those members staying with HP. Those companies migrating need to speak out freely about their experiences. As a journalist for almost 30 years, I've seen a decline in the independence of speaking on the record. I'd love to start a revolution in that regard and roll back the calendar, but anonymous sources have become a bulwark in reporting. The journalism community represented at the Washington, DC Newseum — a fine stop for any citizen-tourist in that town — has grave doubts about anonymous sources. We reporters trade credibility for trust when we need to use these sources.

I'd use fewer of these with more customers going on the record. Public meetings, open to both users and the press, are becoming rare indeed. It's up to 3000 community members to speak out online, where the speaker has more control of what's being reported.

In fact, the demise of public meetings was one factor in passing up the HP Technology Forum & Expo this year. This is first year since 1985 that I haven't attended a national-level HP user conference. After 24 annual events in a row, it seemed that things have changed between HP and the press. Last year I complained about the frustration of incomplete press access at HPTF. Things have shifted in HP's press approach, which makes the Internet and blogs the reasonable alternative to hearing community members' voices.

There's been a bit of good change, like hearing HP talk live to the analysts about quarterly reports via the Internet. But when Computerworld is standing outside a meeting door alongside the 3000 NewsWire, then HPTF starts to look like a restricted event. The user forums were ideal for a journalist who wants in-person connections with new sources. Users voicing opinions and telling stories about their customer experience is the meat of a conference. I understand how that won't serve HP as well as it did in the 80s or even the 90s. Sometimes you just have to accept changes.

As a community member you don't have to accept a less independent strategy. HP does operate a few forums online where customers can share opinion and experience. But the filtering is profound these days, probably reflecting the whole spin dance companies do with the media. You control your statements if you can speak out in places like Twitter, Linked In and Facebook (all of which have 3000-related followings and groups), as well as the Connect user group's online MPE forum. We'll be hearing more about that group in awhile, according to Connect board director Chris Koppe.

Until then and beyond, I hope you'll share your independent statements with your community and me here at the NewsWire. Enjoy and exercise your independence as a citizen, community member, or both.

That's a combination often cited as a safe path into a future where HP won't even support the 3000. While it seems easy to say "get better trained on Microsoft solutions," Michael Anderson of J3K Solutions says MS is only part of a smart future.

"I honestly would not count on Microsoft owning the majority of the market twenty years from now," says Anderson, who left an HP 3000 job to start his own enterprise. "Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Learn how virtualization improves the efficiency and availability of IT resources and applications. Run multiple operating systems and learn new concepts, look into cloud computing and open source."

Anderson advised not to put all of your effort into learning any Microsoft technology, but to look into platform-independent technologies. He offered a few links to explore:

Basics of the Unix Philosophy
A Unix Programming Portal 
Virtualization
Cloud computing

In that cloud computing summary, 3000 pros might see a reflection of the system's past, where time-sharing provided computing resources to multiple companies over a network. The similarity underscores the value of IT basics the 3000 pro can call upon. Veterans of this community are making a living blending their still-valued 3000 skills and new tools. One supplier of consulting and resales, who wants to comment anonymously, wrote to share his success working with 3000s and other tools.

This 3000 expert had a one-year contract to move a company off the HP 3000 to Eloquence and AcuCOBOL, but he's retained the client while working to maintain its network, UPS, and telephone switch as well as removing PC viruses.

Of late, that kind of help has emerged from stewards around the world updating Samba, Apache, or the latest extension to the power of Linux. But another category is emerging with fresh opportunity: the commercial open source software organization. Openbravo, an ERP app being introduced to 3000 migration candidates by Entsgo, is among the best-organized of these solutions. Its community gathers and creates the Community Edition using a Wiki for free, but Openbravo also offers an Openbravo Network implementation including an annual professional support subscription service.

Openbravo is so complete that the software includes tools available for non-developers to modify the app suite. While this might sound like a risky move, many 3000 owners have little in the way of traditional development staff. The 3000 was offered to the non-DP kind of customer. That's Data Processing, for anyone searching for IT or MIS as a label for the technologists in the community.

Even though Openbravo is offered with source code included, these tools give customization to users who know business processes better than COBOL or C.

If you look at the Openbravo community, says Entsgo's Engagement Manager Sue Kiesel, "it isn't just developers. It's users, too, because they have tools for people like me, who really aren't technology people, so we can modify the code."

Kiesel said she wrote add-on modules to Openbravo during Entsgo's training for the app. "We also modified existing forms and lookup tables, and added content. It's very easy to do." These tools operate through a Web-based interface.

In addition to making changes to handling processes like this, the application's published source can be modified. Under the terms of the Openbravo Public License Version 1.1, any modifications a user makes to the published source code must be made available, just like many other open source solutions.

The software is available as a free download, also in keeping with the open source model. But since it's an ERP-class solution, using a partner such as Entsgo is Openbravo's preferred path into a company. Chief Operating Officer Josep Mitja says

That said, a company that's dedicated to using state-of-the-art tools can do its own development. This is territory where a non-3000 platform will be replacing something like a MANMAN, so the Openbravo app suite is built for industry-standard systems. Openbravo is developed in Java, SQL and PL/SQL. Most developers work on a Linux machine with a PostgreSQL or Oracle database, the Java Development Kit, Apache Ant and Tomcat installed. Java coding and debugging is done in Eclipse.

There is a great deal of headroom for the growth of functionality in Openbravo, plus the means to accomlish it through the commercial open source community.

"It doesn't have the depth and breadth of a MANMAN yet," Kiesel said. "But MANMAN didn't either in its first seven years. It took 20 years. The open source idea is wonderful. But I think the idea that really excites me is the community. The fact is that Openbravo's business model is not based on how much money they can make off of you. It's, 'How we can not only share the burden, but share the rewards.' "

A software collective launched in the '90s by the University of Navarra which has evolved to Openbravo, S.L., Openbravo is utilized by manufacturing firms around the world. Openbravo is big stuff. So large that it is one of the ten largest projects on the SourceForge.net open source repository, until Openbravo outgrew SourceForge. The software, its partners and users have their own Forge running today. HP 3000 support firm the Support Group, inc (tSGi) has put its Entsgo spinoff on track to deploy Openbravo. All the pieces should be ready within nine months, said Entsgo's Engagement Manager Sue Kiesel.

Kiesel and Entsgo are part of the tSGi enterprise that grew up aiding customers of MANMAN, the venerable and stable 3000 ERP app. Entsgo is proving the open source ERP concept this year in segments outside the HP 3000 community. “We’re working on a couple of deals right now that are going to be closing relatively soon,” Kiesel said. “We believe that within six to nine months, the solution will be as robust as MANMAN was at its best.”

Open source solutions can span a wide range of organization, from code forges with revisions and little else to the one-stop feel of a vendor, minus the high costs and long waits. Openbravo is in the latter category, operating with 100 employees and having received more than $18 million in funding. If that doesn't sound much like the Apache and Samba open source experience, then welcome to Open Source 2.0, where subscription fees have replaced software purchases and partner firms join alongside users to develop the software.

Openbravo says the model is "commercial open source business model that eliminates software license fees, providing support, services, and product enhancements via an annual subscription." Entsgo/tSGi business consultant Donnie Poston said the one-stop model makes Openbravo attractive.

“The fact that you have a company that supports it, and you can subscribe to it and verifies it, upgrades it and maintains it — all of that under one company name was enticing to us,” said Poston.

Localization capabilities will be among the last pieces of Openbravo to fall into place, and tSGi president David Floyd says for some HP 3000 owners, the Openbravo solution is ready today. In the meantime, the open source model fits well with HP 3000 strategies.

“In the 3000 community, we’re used to the independence of the open source model,” said Kiesel. “We’re used to tools that are intuitive, and if you look at us, we should be able to embrace open source more than any other community.”

Open source practices turn the enhancement experience upside down for an application. In the traditional model, a single vendor writes software at a significant investment for high profits, then accepts requests for enhancements and repairs. A complex app such as ERP might not even get 10 percent of these requests fulfilled by the average vendor.

The open source community around Openbravo operates like many open source enterprises. Companies create their own enhancements, license them back to the community, and can access bug fixes quickly—all because the ownership is shared and the source code for the app is open.

Entsgo experts such as Kiesel are establishing a trusted advisory resource for Openbravo. Entsgo is a partner to IBM, HP, Oracle, Microsoft, and top-tier ERP vendors, serving small to medium-sized manufacturing and supply chain businesses in Texas and throughout the worldwide manufacturing community.

IT manager Bradley Rish said that inefficiencies of the Oracle database design in Ecometry create a performance bottleneck. Their study of IO traffic revealed six files whose performance creates a bottleneck. And the best-performing file of those six "was still 20 times slower than number 7," Rish said, adding that Ecometry's design needs an upgrade to push the Windows edition faster than the 3000's MPE/iX and IMAGE.

Potpourri, which is a holding company that serves 11 other catalog brands, processes 3 million customer transactions a year through phone sales and the Internet. But one half of that 3 million flows in during the high-season's fourth quarter. To handle this business load, the Ecometry installation at Potpourri needed a wide spread of 76 disk spindles and four DL580 servers configured in a cluster. That hardware arrived after Potpourri had already installed and then walked away from an HP-UX RP4400 and its disks.

"Ecometry is IO unfriendly under Oracle," said Rish, "but it's less unfriendly under Windows than HP-UX. It's still not as fast as the 3000. [Ecometry vendor] Escalate need to their act together on optimizing it."

Potpourri's board of directors put the migration in motion during 2005, after a couple of years of research by IT. The exit from the 3000 was based on HP's plans for the computer, not any inability to serve the 200-plus in-house users, plus Web transactions. The HP-UX version of the migration went live in 2007, while the Windows migration went into production mode last year.

Data migration required eight months, more than the IT pros at the company estimated. Rish said that two full-time pros, working the equivalent of one year each, were need to complete the migration to Windows.

Choosing those rack-mounted DL580s from HP got Potpourri to a wider selection of disk platforms. Reconfiguring the SAN environment cost $200,000 in disk hardware, he estimated. The entire project, including Ecometry's consulting, all software licenses and hardware, came in at $1.2-$1.5 million.

Potpourri has been live on Ecometry Windows for a year. Benefits Rish cites for moving away from HP-UX include more affordable Oracle licenses, improved horsepower (the DL580s use multiple 4-core Xeon processors), better options for cluster redundancy, and more in-house expertise. Potpoutrri went from a HP 3000-Windows experience to an all-Windows solution. Although the 3-CPU N-Class server had older disk technology, the Windows installation will need a database revision from Ecometry to meet the 3000-IMAGE performance.

Batch and job processing is an HP 3000 feature that migrating customers need to replace for Windows projects. Rish said Fluent Edge Technologies, which specializes in support of Ecometry sites both homesteading and migrating, suggested the Online Toolworks product SmartBatch.

Rish said that Potpourri is preparing a shift to a new PCI-compliant encryption solution. The company is targeting a May, 2010 go-live date for the new solution; the PCI compliance deadline is July, 2010.

He also said that the experience of migrating onto an Oracle solution has a personal benefit for any IT pro who makes the move. "It makes you much more marketable," he said, adding expertise in the widely-installed database. He added that Oracle's Linux solutions could extend career paths even further, since Oracle says that Linux is its leading development platform.