Saturday, April 26, 2008

Setting hooks for migration via replacement

In a continuation of our Q&A interview with MB Foster's chairman Birket Foster, we asked what issues a replacement migration sparks for 3000 sites. His firm is one of two HP Platinum Migration partners still active out of an initial four (Speedware is the other). After six years of delivering advice on the migration, he had plenty to share.

What have you seen at the 3000 site which needs to replace an application, rather than adopt a system from a corporate parent?

   We've been on many sites where we've helped customers through the software selection process. We look at what kind of items would be mandatory, then nice-to-haves, and build a matrix across software choices so they can compare apples to apples.

Does your company, as a Platinum Migration partner, give away to the community some of what you know and have learned?

   We certainly help coach people through things, especially through our series of seminars and Webinars. Our basic criteria these days is to make sure the business side is involved. You have to have someone from the senior management team who can okay a budget. To give you an example of costs, in the small and medium businesses they think it's $13,000 a seat all in. If you have 50 people, that racks up pretty quick.

   You have to end up talking to senior management because there's a business fit as well as an IT fit. In the absence of that, you're just grading things against what IT thinks they should be. Frankly, the application runs the business, and IT just provides the wheels underneath it.

How many migrating sites consider the share of budget that Windows requires?

    There are lots of people who have never managed where they spend their money. There is some consciousness-raising going on. There's also the possibility that the senior management team doesn't understand what their investment in IT should be.

   So we've been doing some work in the area of application portfolio management, so people can understand how a portfolio of applications that run a company can be evaluated. So people can understand how to plan their investments in IT.

How busy is your migration service staff today? In the past the Platinum partners had expertise still on the bench.

   Now they're all actively working here, and in fact we're hiring additional members into the team. Everybody's busy, and we're probably running a dozen migrations.

Does your hiring extend to people with 3000 expertise?

    It's more likely to be domain expertise, where somebody knows the healthcare industry or they know the manufacturing industry well. That's more important than specific application knowledge on an HP 3000. Unless they're the person chosen to hold the fort while everybody else goes off and starts up the new application.

   In a case of someone who could look after an application and make sure that it ran smoothly, so it would free up the current staff so they could work on the new app, that might be a situation where we would hire someone on the 3000 side.

   For a large part of this, the application is being replaced by something off the shelf. So quite frankly, the 3000 skill sets aren't going to help. Things like understanding COBOL and how to compile it, FORTRAN, Pascal and C++, all of those things might be handy.

Replacement projects like that sometimes have to hurdle the use of very specific HP 3000 software, right?

   Yes, there are tools that have been used in the HP 3000 environment in creative ways. The trouble with having somebody MacGyver something is that it's really hard to find the equivalent in a new environment. Part of the process is always to survey how people used what third party tools, what they were using, what did they write themselves — and then understand how the entire environment works with the entire corporation. And perhaps with trading partners on the supply side and the demand side.

Do you sometimes have to encourage training in a new solution to get those MacGyver-isms replaced?

    In some cases they have no idea what it actually does. The problem is that the guy who wrote it is long gone. The current folks don't know what's there, or why it's there. They just pray that it keeps running.

You're one of the most prolific presenters at HP 3000 conferences and community meetings. Would it be fair to say that the overall message of these presentations is "There may be many points to consider which you're not yet aware of?"

   We've been helping people move data since 1985. We've been in this business a very long time, and it only got formalized six years ago. We've learned a ton of stuff along the way for things that are going to bite people. It's called wisdom, and wisdom comes from experience — and experience can come from doing it wrong once.

Is your business starting to trend toward services being the larger part of what you do for the community?

   I think migrations, and the sale of migration tools which do include some of our own software tools, will be a bigger part of the business this year than they have been in the past. I expect they will cross the line and become the larger part of the business.

    People are starting to recognize in their own organizations that the ability to support an application, do any major modifications, all of those things are becoming more difficult. The customers are doing an evaluation to see if their application operations are sustainable. "How will we train the next person?" When people start asking those kinds of questions, they're quite surprised sometimes. Like finding spreadsheets which run a department, but have nothing to do with an IT department, but probably should have.

   The informal stuff is what you need to find in your organization, these rogue applications. When we're engaged to work with a customer, there is a mandate to understand the departmental applications and operations.

Landing new ideas for 3000 users

Birket Foster is not running for election this spring, but he is campaigning for some new ideas. The founder of MB Foster, he's stood on both the homesteading and migration avenues for more than six years — and as he likes to point out, much longer when you consider moving data as a migration.

    This week the OpenMPE group which Foster has chaired since its 2002 inception announced election results, looking for volunteer help to get HP's agreement on source code licensing. But the scope of Foster advocacy and business reaches well beyond software, stepping into services in a big enough way that it will soon overtake software at his company. That says something about a supplier who's been selling 3000 solutions so long.

   With an election on hand and services heating up, we figured Birket — one of those community members known best by his first name — would have something to say about the new 3000 opportunities and persistent challenges. We talked to him in the week before February's election, on his cell while he traveled to a customer site.

Some in the 3000 community are wondering why, more than five years into the Transition Era, OpenMPE is having another election of its board. Can your volunteers make a difference, so long after HP sparked customers to migrate?

    Our work for now is to make HP realize there is going to be a presence of people who will be there, after HP leaves.

Are there enough members in OpenMPE for HP to consider putting MPE into the hands of the community?

   HP will never put MPE in the hands of the community. They will only put it in the hands of someone who will be qualified to manage and maintain the source code — which is the whole purpose of OpenMPE, becoming that group.

Is there any chance of HP selecting OpenMPE as that group?

    Absolutely. We've talked about doing a mini-project up front, like soon just to prove ourselves, so HP gets a fire drill on what it's like to do a patch without people internal to HP. And they haven't done a patch in the last little bit, right?

So what does a mini-project look like?

   Oh, you'd find something that needs to be changed, you'd make a specification, and you'd sit with a contractor and say what you need them to do. There's no reason why OpenMPE can't be those guys. The talent that has put their names forward to be part of the group to do development is rock-solid.

So the OpenMPE mission will certainly consist of services. The 3000 community's market seems to be turning toward services now, especially from the well-known vendors which the customers rely upon. What's MB Foster doing today to expand services in addition to its product support and migration expertise?

    For some 3000 sites we already provide some services in the area of our specialties, which are dealing with data. We have assisted customers in recruiting people for full-time employment for multi-year contracts in the HP 3000 space — because those people needed staff, and didn't know where to find them.

This location service costs something for a customer?

   It's a courtesy for the customers. It helps them out, and they like us, they buy our products, and they get other services from us. In some cases, we're hosting their data marts, because we do this every day. It's a lot easier on the customer when they can rely on a data mart team that's working on a bunch of sites, knows the tools inside out and helped develop them. Most of those are on Windows or HP-UX.

Hosting in this case means having a server running so the customer doesn't need to run one, or keep staff busy?

   That's correct. In the long run, hosting is going to be a very important part of how small- and medium-sized business and departmental computing gets done. That's because the cost for staff these days is five skill sets, although you might find them in as few as three people. That means your staffing cost is going to be $300,000 to $800,000 in order to get the right people involved. That's quite a bit of money, so a lot of divisions would rather buy part of someone's time, knowing that person is an expert and will do exactly what's needed.

This kind of expertise, is it beginning to leave the industry?

   Retirement is an issue, both the retirement of end-user experts as well as the technical experts. The end-user experts are as important, or even more important, than the technicians. Once the application is running, so long as someone can follow the script for daily, weekly and monthly processes, it's not a big deal. But when they go in and lose an end-user, it takes awhile to train a new one. Many times what that end user who's been there a long time hasn't been written down anywhere.

By end-user expert, you mean someone who's well-versed in how to run an in-house application?

    Not just in-house, but any application that runs the business. Take a look at what's happened to MANMAN. It's changed hands four times, from ASK to Computer Associates to SSA GT, and now it's gone to Infor. It's had multiple owners and definite changes in the way that things are supported and maintained.

    MANMAN is a pretty big manufacturing application for the 3000 community. People are still running it, although not as many as there were, but a lot of them. The challenge with knowing how many is that some of those customers are a division of a larger company — and that larger company doesn't share the IT plan down to the division level anymore.