[Info-vax] 1 year.

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-08-09 14:42:59 +0000, IanD said:

> On Sunday, August 9, 2015 at 11:22:07 PM UTC+10, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> 
>> But it's been my experience that folks that have a migration and 
>> consolidation plan to a different application product and that are 
>> making statements such as IanD has posted here are not usually 
>> interested in expending more than minimally necessary on the old 
>> configuration.  Not without a financial case, and sometimes not even 
>> then.  Emulation becomes an option when the existing hardware becomes 
>> more costly to maintain and to run than the cost of the switch over to 
>> emulation.  This when some non-trivial part of the application source 
>> code is missing and which means that anything short of translation or 
>> emulation can be viewed as cost-prohibitive, and particularly when 
>> there's already a viable target to migrate folks available here.
> 
> and yet again I see your experience of real world dealings popping up 
> in your comments :-)
> I wish your timelines were a little nicer but I have a suspicion they 
> are probably not to far from the mark

Folks that skipped last platform port aren't usually the most 
aggressive at porting to the follow-on platform, either.

> Yes, for us, the application supports a class of customers that are not 
> the future, so minimal amounts of spending is the normal here, that is 
> how the whole application got to be in the state it is in, it was all 
> meant to slowly vanish and die away by now

Quite typical in legacy support.  I get calls from and variously work 
with folks in this situation, too.   Requirements for much work beyond 
bringing some necessary service online or up to more current — updated 
encryption and TLS requirements are among the most popular choices — 
and resolving software or hardware errors or a server-down are rare for 
these sites.

> To stay on VMS would mean an application rewrite and the so called 
> architects who think linux is the future for everything and the 
> solution to everything will never support a rewrite to VMS - it simply 
> does not offer the business any advantages that wins them business or 
> supports their business any more than does a linux solution, or so the 
> architects tell them.

Ayup; the systemd and BSD platforms are the likely targets for most new 
server deployments, for those working outside of the Microsoft 
ecosystem.

> They do not care about TCO, why should they, the business has 
> outsourced all their IT to an IT company that runs it mostly offshore 
> at bargain prices and they certainly don't want to support VMS either 
> because they find it extremely difficult to get VMS resources as it is

If by "extremely difficult" you mean "more expensive than they'd like", 
yes.   There are and can be OpenVMS folks around.  That particular part 
of the job market is simply skewed away from what hiring managers 
prefer, at present.  The managers don't want to pay to train their own 
folks, and the folks that are trained and experienced can command a 
premium.

As for outsourcing, IT is not perceived as a differentiator by many 
organizations.   Or it is not a differentiator.   Whether it can become 
a differentiator?  That takes insight and budget and time and effort.  
And marketing and luck and nerve.  Etc.

Discussions of TCO can be an incremental benefit and a nice-to-have for 
an installed-base sale, but TCO is only one factor in the aggregate 
costs and efforts involved for a new deployment or for a platform 
migration.  Like benchmarks, TCO also depends heavily on what was 
measured, too.  Programming on some other platforms with 
well-integrated IDEs and deployment tools and integration is just 
easier and faster than on OpenVMS, for instance.  That's before 
commencing my usual grumbling around the state of languages and 
frameworks and services.

> Emulators are fine for most not wanting to move up the architectural 
> path but some of us are stuck in no-man's land with aging hardware that 
> is too fast for an emulator at this stage, and with HP dropping support 
> all over the place for anything that even hints of an Alpha smell, 
> migrating away is our only near term option

Or doing what some folks in this case do, and that's rolling out spares 
and preparing for self-maintenance.  This unfortunately doesn't really 
fit — organizationally, managerially or financially — with what you're 
describing for the existing application environment.   Probably the 
best outcome would be a spin-off or sell-off, if that's an option and 
if there's a buyer.  But given the reported goal to incrementally 
migrate these folks to a different environment, that'd arguably just 
create a competitor.


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