[Info-vax] VMS - what is the current thinking amongst the user community

[Jon.Power at sector7.com]

It been a long time since I posted anything - Sector7 has been working
away at migrating various applications - not much change there - We
are releasing 3.3 of the migration libraries - which provide full
duplex asynchronous I/O, AST's (supervisor, kernel, user etc) - and
has tested at doing over 50,000 lock conversion per second on some old
Intel equipment.

So much for the bits and bytes - Obviously, the projects we see these
days are no longer the 'low hanging fruit' - we are - as always -
focused on complex code migrations - I would be very interested in
understanding what the VMS users "feel about" VMS. We seem to be
seeing large corporations with UNIX as the focus - that have a VMS
server / cluster that is working perfectly - but - represents a very
small percentage of the organizations skill set - and yet is as
mission critial as any other server.

We wont be soliciting / calling or even emailing - but - If anyone
feel so inclined I'd especially like to hear:

(a) Is your VMS system running mainly home grown application or
packaged
(b) If homegrown - are there any specific VMS API/ Subsystems - that
make VMS irreplaceable (lock manager, clustering etc)
(c) Is there any 'software' that would make life easier - I hate to
use the DEC I14Y "Interoperability" - only because - I still miss
DECUS / New Orleans and the TGV guys paying a for several great nights
out.
(d) Is there still the religious fervor associated with VMS? (after
having to duplicate the AST/QIO/Lock Manager mechanisms - I have even
a greater appreciation of VMS internals)
(e) What programming languages are popular ? (no one has asked for
BASIC or DIBOL for 2 or 3 years)
(f) If VMS was going to be replaced - as VMS guys - what target would
you lean toward (AIX/HPUX/LINUX/Solaris x86)

I appreciate anyone taking the time to read this.

Sincerely