[Info-vax] Updated HPE/VSI OpenVMS V8.4-2L1 Marketing Brochures

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-10-01 14:01:23 +0000, Kerry Main said:

> It's been discussed a thousand times before, but imho, open source is a 
> terrible strategy for OpenVMS.

But whether the current OpenVMS strategy will work out?

>> I understand that VSI have probably negotiated the best deal they could 
>> with HPE at the time, my probing and being the antagonist is not meant 
>> to be negative about the whole thing but more to put my hat into the 
>> ring as to where/what I think would help OpenVMS going forward. I know 
>> people in academic circles and linux is still king because of open 
>> source and the education sector is driving the minds of the future 
>> coders. I just want to find a way to attract them to OpenVMS if at all 
>> possible
> 
> I would argue that the one of the big interests at the enterprise level 
> in Linux is its perceived "free" cost. There is more than one business 
> case that has been pushed which compares license costs to Linux (free) 
> vs. its competition (expensive up front licenses).

Guess where all the new deployments and the prototype projects happen?  
 On Linux.   Because folks don't need to acquire licenses, can re-use 
available hardware, and can grow into vendor support if (when?) that 
becomes necessary.    Because folks are familiar with managing and 
developing for the Linux platform.   Because the tools that us younger 
folks prefer — yes, I'm one of the younger folks, per VSI — are 
available for Linux.   Because OpenVMS has no entry-level product 
offerings.  Because at least prior to x86-64 and we don't know what 
hardware will be supported with that, OpenVMS requires special hardware.

This greatly reduces the numbers of experimental and development 
projects that might decide to start on OpenVMS, and greatly increases 
the numbers starting on Linux.

Gaining — or regaining — a market in the commercial operating system 
business is a large and expensive endeavor, with more than a little 
risk particularly given the competition and given the market is 
consolidating, and any entrant very likely takes a decade or more of 
"runway" just to get some traction and some visibility — visibility 
outside the installed base, in the case of OpenVMS.

Software and operating system prices are increasingly free — that's 
what everybody's been increasingly trained to expect — and with in-app 
purchases and support costs and value-added features and related.

Competing against "free" with a commercial product and with no free 
license tier is not an easy sales call.   Then there's the cost of 
running a sales organization, which isn't cheap and which usually means 
the low-volume sales — the sorts of sales of the sizes that small teams 
and prototype projects that might just be starting out — can get fewer 
sales callbacks from even the resellers.

We're not in the same market that spawned the classic OpenVMS 
licensing, pricing and sales approaches.


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