[Info-vax] HP wins Oracle Itanium case

[JF Mezei]

Mr Paris,

I realise you are  the messenger from HP. So I do not intend to shoot
the messenger here.

The wording put out never mentioned that IA64 is to be developped until
2022. It mentions that Intel is to make available chips until 2022. In
other words, Intel will keep surplus IA64 chips until 2022.  This means
available spares for support beyond end of sale. It doesn't mean
continued development until 2022.

Depending on the size of the Kittson production run, HP could also keep
one or two Kittson based IA64 models on the price list for quite some
time to help customers who need togrow capacity and can't yet migrate to
the 8086.

(Note that HP did something similar with Alphas, with some "special"
customers able to buy Alphas after the end of sales deadline).

It should be noted that with BCS sales have been free falling since last
year, so one cannot foresee a significant increase in demand for IA64
based systems. HP will likely have to expand "we will cater to the
existing customer base" message from VMS to HP-UX as well.


Customers have already accepted that Kittson and kittson+ are the end of
the line for IA64. Customers know that sales of IA64 systems will
continue for at east 2-3 years beyond first sale of a Kittson+ system.
And they know that support will continue for many many years after that.

However, it is not clear how much software support and upgrades will be
done to the IA64 operating systems. Once the last VMS patch is out to
support the alst Kittson+ based model, will VMS patches continue to be
produced ?  Will TCPIP Services continue to have new releases to support
whatever protocol tweaks are made on the internet ?

This is where HP's denial of the obvious hurts its own image and its own
credibility. The VMS development team has already been decimated in
preparation for the EOL, the roadmap has been shrunken to just a couple
of . releases to support Poulson and Kittson.

People understand that IA64 failed to garner market traction to become
mainstream and failed to live up to performance expectations. This isn't
where HP gets hurt, it is in how HP handles this that HP shoots itself
in the foot.

People see that HP has put it on life support to extend its lifetime.
But HP should be using this extended artificial life support to help
customer migrate instead of pretending that the Itanic isn't sinking.


What differentiates enterprise companies such as IBM from commodity ones
like Dell, ASUS and others is trust and communications. By basically
lying to customers about the real plans for IA64, HP is destroying its
enterprise vendor image and becoming an untrustable commodity maker who
will lie to customers to delay them buying replacement systems,

And considering the boardroom dramas that have happened at HP, including
the spying episodes, HP should be working to regain trust of customers
intead of continuing to lie to them.

It isn't the EOL of IA64 that is hurting HP. It is how HP is denying it
that is hurting it.


It is pretty simple for HP to justify the EOL. It merely has to look at
cost performance of IA64 versus the 8086 and say that 8086 is faster and
cheaper and now supports enterprise features. (cue project Odyssey).

Where it is a bit harder is HP explaining that none of the IA64
operating systems are going to make it to the 8086, and then provide
good information on porting plans, porting help, porting tools and what
extra middleware HP will provide on Linux to make it "enterprise worthy".

The time to do this is now. This way customers can start to plan
migrations while still comfortable with 2 more system upgrades possible.