Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition--IBM Touts iSeries Success in Replacing HP 3000

It's not often that you hear the VIPs at IBM's corporate headquarters, in Armonk, New York, talking about how wonderful the iSeries is. That's why it's important to highlight two announcements that Big Blue made last Friday concerning recent successes the iSeries has had in replacing the HP 3000 midrange server, which Hewlett-Packard stopped selling on October 31, ending a very impressive 31-year run.

Lady Remington Jewelry and Strauss Discount Auto are replacing their HP 3000s with iSeries servers, IBM announced last week. Lady Remington Jewelry's IT department found it difficult to continually adapt its highly customized application every time the HP 3000's operating system, MPE, was upgraded. In searching for a replacement, stability of the operating system was a big factor.

If Lady Remington had followed HP's advice, the company would have made the move to HP-UX, the computer giant's proprietary flavor of the Unix operating system. But the complexity of Unix, not to mention what he found to be a lack of prepackaged distribution applications designed for Unix, did not favor the open operating system, says Al Karman, Lady Remington's IT director. "We're trying desperately to keep being a jewelry company," he says. "We're not that interested in becoming a technology company or becoming a beta site for Microsoft.

As for the Redmond, Washington, Windows vendor, there may have been more applications available for Windows, but making that move involved crossing a line that didn't sit well with Karman, who has worked on HP 3000s for 20 years. "Like most of the free world, we run Microsoft on the desktop," he says. "But when it comes to the enterprise, I can't with a clear conscience run Windows. They don't have anything that resembles a commitment to quality. What's coming out of Redmond is words."

When it came right down to it, Lady Remington's platform decision was determined by what application fit it best, and that was HarrisData's RPG-based ERP package. "HarrisData's package rose to the top," Karman says. "It has a deep scope, and its ILE RPG is easy to maintain."

At Strauss Discount Auto, OS/400 servers and HP 3000s have been running side by side for years, as a result of two acquisitions that made the company one of the largest providers of after-market parts in the Northeastern United States, so the move to the iSeries was a good fit.

Today, Strauss runs six iSeries servers and one xSeries, attached via an Integrated xSeries Adapter (IxA), which lets the company share iSeries DASD and tape backup. As a result of the moves, Strauss has improved its Windows performance and has reduced its hardware maintenance and software licensing costs by $80,000 per year, IBM says. "With the iSeries solution, we've simplified our business processes and become more productive and efficient," says Larry Berrill, vice president of information systems for Strauss. "IBM has been a great partner for us."

IBM could not say how many other HP 3000 shops will be making the move to the iSeries. When HP announced, in November 2001, that it would stop selling its proprietary midrange line in October 2003, and would end technical support in 2006, the OS/400 server, with its tightly integrated database and operating system (similar to the HP 3000's architecture) immediately rose to the forefront as a suitable replacement.

Earlier this year, CommerialWare, a developer of OS/400-based merchandising applications for multi-channel retailers, announced that mountain bike marketer Jenson USA would replace its HP 3000-based Ecometry application, as well as a Windows NT system, with a new iSeries system.

Boyd Coffee Co., based in Portland, Oregon, is another HP 3000 shop that is considering a move to the iSeries. "We're in vendor-evaluation mode," says Lane Rollins, the company's IT manager. "One potential application we're looking at is J.D. Edwards." It's more of an application issue than a hardware issue that will drive his company's decision, Rollins says, but even so, he realizes there are definite similarities between the two platforms, related to their proprietary nature. "It's bizarre; people talk about RPG they way they talk about COBOL on the '3000," he says.

Having been stung once with HP and its sudden decision to kill the HP 3000, Patrick McMahon, a system manager at Akron, Ohio, based Summit Racing Equipment, isn't about to put himself in the same situation. He had considered the iSeries at one point but will be implementing HP-UX instead. "It's only a matter of time," he says. "IBM's going to do the same thing" [that HP did to the HP 3000].

Al Karman, Lady Remington IT director, would disagree. "Proprietary is proprietary. It's a fact of life," he says. "I don't see the open systems movement being robust enough to run my business on. 'Open systems' is a bad joke on the American people."

With IBM's commitment to spend $500 million on iSeries development over a two-year period, Karman doesn't see the iSeries going away any time soon. "I believe IBM is taking the right approach," he says. "I look at the ecosystem as being in good shape. There's good interest in third-party applications, good marketing. IBM paid attention to HP's missteps. They're selling solutions, not selling a box."

Karman would recommend the iSeries to other HP 3000 shops "in a heartbeat," and gave this warning: "Don't be dazzled by hardware. There are lots of guys who see a computer commercial on TV the night before and come into the boardroom the next day, and that's the company's strategy," he says. "We're smart enough as an organization to know that you get what you pay for."

In other IBM customer news, Alpine Electronics of America and Oakwood Healthcare Systems are replacing their HP-UX boxes with AIX servers, and IBM Global Services is taking over IT systems for perfume-maker Elizabeth Arden, a JDA Software customer and a former OS/400 shop.