[Info-vax] Accuweather new contract

[Jess Goodman]

VAXman wrote:
"Jess Goodman would be a good candidate to comment on this. I'm pretty sure he lurks and reads c.o.v."

I have very little lurking time available now-a-days, but eventually I did stumble upon this thread.  My bad luck since I guess I am now forced to comment upon it.

My apologies in advance, but because this thread is in an open forum I will not be able to address all of the questions and speculations about AccuWeather contained in it.  Nor can I be very specific in what I am allowed to say.  But with that said, I can say this:

o  I am employed at AccuWeather as the OpenVMS Administrator and Senior Engineer for VMS development. 
o  AccuWeather also employs Administrators and developers for other OSs, including Microsoft Windows.
o  The recent TV commercials about AccuWeather were made by and paid for by Microsoft.
o  The not-so-recent (2004) HP success stories about AccuWeather were made by and paid for by HP.
o  Both sets of ads featured AccuWeather in a very favorable light. Of course we were delighted to participate in them, regardless of what OS they might be promoting.
o  The only OSs that AccuWeather has ever deliberately promoted are, due to our leadership position in mobile weather apps, Android and IOS.
o  We have never hidden the fact that AccuWeather uses VMS, although the Microsoft video crew did so (literally) while they were filming here.
o  We have fewer VMS developers (and many more Windows developers) now than we had in 2004.
o  Our meteorologists still log into our VMS cluster (or, as they insist on calling it, "the VAX") from PCs using PowerTerm, but they now use a browser and our internal web site a lot more than they use a DCL command line.
o  A significant part of our back-end forecasting services still runs under VMS (Alpha and Itanium), but in 2004 it almost all ran on VMS, as did the back-end services for our web site.

Over 10 years ago, just after HP released AccuWeather's "success" story, there was a C.O.V. thread very similar to this one. I was not allowed to inject any context to HP's story about us back then, but I can say now what I was thinking then. From that story:

<< With Attunity Connect, the AccuWeather website seamlessly accesses weather conditions and forecast data directly from the OpenVMS systems, eliminating the bottlenecks and performance problems that were introduced when the data had to be replicated in SQL Server.

"We decided to stay on OpenVMS because the platform still has a lot of life in it. The Attunity solution allowed us to remain on OpenVMS and leverage its power, speed, accuracy and security," states Fiore. >>

What Kathy Fiore, our CIO at that time, said then was entirely true, but take a moment and try to read between the lines.  I'll wait... OK, now - do you still think that this story should go in the win column for VMS? I don't!

"We decided to stay on OpenVMS...". In other words we had almost decided to move all of the back-end servicing of our public web site off of VMS.

"...the platform still has a lot of life in it." In other words it may be dying, but it 'aint dead yet.

"With Attunity Connect the website seamlessly accesses...data directly from OpenVMS..."  Attunity Connect is excellent middleware, but it is still middleware, and IMO middleware does not belong in any "final" design.  It was a huge help to us at first, but after a while it turned into something that was getting in our way more than it was helping us. So eventually the web-site back-end was moved off of VMS anyway.

"...bottlenecks and performance problems that were introduced when the data had to be replicated..."  The obvious but unanswered question is:  Why did this data have to be replicated in the first place?  The answer: because there was no webserver for VMS that could scale to anywhere near the performance capacity that AccuWeather required.

J. Goodman
"I have one but it's personal."