iSeries Partners Gearing Up HP 3000 Migration Tools

by Alex Woodie

Magic Software is aiming its new migration initiative at both users and independent software vendors that write for HP 3000's operating system, MPE/ix. The company hopes to lure developers and users to its fourth generation language (4GL) development environment, called Magic eDeveloper, which uses a component-based development approach that cuts development time and maintenance effort, and allows users to deploy applications on their choice of platform, according to Glenn Johnson, Magic's marketing and communications manager.

Magic has extensive experience with migrating applications and data, Johnson says, and has done quite a bit of work integrating COBOL, the most popular development language for the HP 3000 environment, into applications developed with eDeveloper. Magic also intends to simplify the re-development process for HP 3000 customers by leveraging third-party applications developed by ISVs who developed with eDeveloper, Johnson says.

HP 3000 users that adopt Magic eDeveloper as their ticket off the 30-year-old platform will use it to create new applications based on the business logic contained in the existing COBOL code, said David Leichner, Magic's vice president of worldwide marketing. As such, Magic's eDeveloper sales pitch to prospective customers who use HP 3000s will not differ significantly from the sales pitches the company makes to other customers, and will highlight the technological advantages of 4GL and component-based development.

However, Magic eDeveloper will also allow HP 3000 users to use an incremental approach for migration, Leichner says. Applications developed with Magic eDeveloper can run in n-tier environments and will be able to use the HP 3000 database in production, giving customers time to gradually move their data off the legacy box and onto new database systems at their leisure, he says.

IBM is also getting ready to gear up its HP-3000-to-iSeries migration offering. In February the company announced that it was working with migration specialists Sector7 to develop a collection of migration assessments, software tools, and consulting services for ISVs and users to move their data and apps to the iSeries.

Tamra Veldhuizem, worldwide marketing manager for the iSeries, said IBM was going to announce a new migration marketing plan by the middle of March. That plan, which was expected to include a series of incentives or discounts to encourage HP 3000 users to move to the iSeries, has not yet been announced, and could be unveiled at the COMMON conference beginning next week in Nashville, an IBM spokesperson said.

Sector7 has experience in migrating HP 3000 customers to IBM platforms, including the AS/400, and has a collection of tools to help automate the process. The company is also working to develop new sets of tools that will make migrations less painful to HP 3000 users. One of these HP 3000 migration toolsets is being readied for OS/400 by TransforMix, an Oceanside, California, HP 3000 specialist.

When the migration tool is ready, it will allow portions of MPE/ix applications that can't be run natively on OS/400 to run in an emulated MPX/ie environment on OS/400, or a "phony operating environment," says Charles Finley, president of TransforMix. The amount of emulation involved in a migration will vary from customer to customer and will eventually disappear as developers create native replacements for specific MPX/ie functions not directly supported in target environments such as OS/400, he said.

Finley, who has started working with the OS/400 platform for the first time as a result of the work he's done on the migration toolset, expressed an admiration for the server. He said the iSeries is very similar to the HP 3000, in terms of its ease of use, its integrated database, and other features such as batch job processing and spoolers.

"It's all self-contained," Finley said of the iSeries. "What you have are people who are used to that with the 3000, so it's kind of a no-brainer to go to an iSeries machine. I think most of the people who go off are going to go to another integrated package."

If HP 3000 customers follow HP's advice and move to Windows, UNIX, or Linux servers, they won't find the same level of ease of use or integration, Finley said. "Unix and Windows don't quite fit the bill, as the iSeries does," he said. "With Windows, you have to link several, end on end. UNIX comes with a warning label: 'Caution: Some assembly required.' You have to assemble all these things together. You don't just plop in a UNIX box."

All of these things point to the iSeries having a shot at recruiting HP 3000 users to the platform. "[To] the people who are aware already and value the things I talked about, it's not a sale," Finley said. "Once the AS/400 is available to HP 3000 users, they won't even consider anything else. The AS/400 is so powerful…if you have superior facilities, you use them."