[Info-vax] New RoadMap out for VMS

[Neil Rieck]

On Oct 3, 2:32 am, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> The unceremonious dumping of the real VMS engineering and replacement by
> newbies was supposed to be transparent to the customer base.
>
> And if HP wanted to make the change transparent, they would have kept
> the roadmaps with plenty of mew features planned, perhaps without a
> timeline since it is harder to plan delivery dates when your team lacks
> experience.
>
> Next year's roadmap could better define the timeline because by then,
> VMS management will have a better grasp on the capabilities of their team.
>
> The anorexic roadmap sends the message that HP is not willing to spend
> much money in the medium and long term to upgrade VMS in any signifiacnt
> way.
>
> Short of a major policy change (Hello Meg Whitman !), it is very
> unlikely that the roadmap will regain weight from its current anorexic
> state and it will simply become a copy of HP's hardware announcements so
> that VMS can run on new IA64 hardware.
>
> Also consider that if HP is already planning the EOL announcement of
> Itanium, it is logical that product roadmaps for products that won't be
> ported beyond IA64 to essentially stop in the next year or two.
>
> On the other hard, HP might surprise us ad the reason the roadmap is
> anorexic is that most of the team is already busy porting to x86.
>
> This is exactly why Meg Whitman has to hurry up to announce what her
> vision/strategy is going to be for HP, especially with regards to the
> BCS/Itanium ecosystem.
>
> If they were to announce that IA64 was going to be EOLed after Poulson
> and that VMS is being ported to x86, then we could all understand
> the currently anorexic roadmap.
>
> But without that announcement, the roadmap points to VMS not longer
> actively being developped and going into maintenance/support mode.
>
> And this is certaintly true when you consider the Oracle/RDB issues.

With HP jettisoning their PC business I would have thought new (or
renewed) attention would have been given to HP's enterprise business.
As others have already mentioned, the road map is full of
inconsistencies leaving me with the impression it was published by a
group who didn't even take the time to have it "proof read".

Perhaps HP management was under the impression that the Enterprise
business was just running fine (as seen from the 10 thousand foot view
of the board room)

Neil Rieck
Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/OpenVMS.html