[Info-vax] New RoadMap out for VMS

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Neil Rieck wrote 2011-10-05 13:28:
> 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

OTOH, you can not have a road-map "with plenty of new features planned"
just for the sake of it. There must be some specific market/customer
need also. I still do not understand what JF is missing (apart
from IPsec maybe) from the raodmap. I agree that it might need
some proof-reading, but that is another question.