[Info-vax] VSI strategy for OpenVMS

[John Dallman]

The current "open source on OpenVMS" caused me to wonder how VSI's
strategic plan for OpenVMS and its applications works. Some bits are
fairly easy to deduce, but others are far less clear. 

The OpenVMS customer base has been slowly shrinking for quite a while.
Since VSI lives on support contract income, this is a serious problem.
Reasons for organisations to carry on using the OS include: 

* High reliability.
* OS-level clustering, rather than application-level clustering. 
* Other specific features of OpenVMS.
* Lack of ability to migrate to another OS at reasonable cost. 
* Customer staff who prefer it, and have the ability to block changes. 

None of those reasons can overcome a prolonged lack of hardware that can
run OpenVMS, so VSI are doing the right thing by making it possible to
run the OS on commodity hardware, and providing the programming languages
and other tools needed to port a lot of customers' software to x86.
Exactly which languages and tools should get priority depends on what
will get VSI the most income, and they know far more than us about what
their customers are using.

But the reasons for carrying on using OpenVMS don't obviously indicate a
particular field or market segment of computing where OpenVMS usage is
concentrated. It seems likely that the existing customers are a somewhat
random selection of the organisations that took up VMS in the 1970s
through 1990s. That creates a problem. 

DEC was a large organisation, capable of having expert teams in most
fields of computing. VSI probably can't manage that. Their efforts to
grow the customer base will presumably have to be focused on one or two
areas. There seems to be a potential problem after customers start
transitioning to x86: demand for software for many different fields, from
a wide variety of customers. 

Porting open source is one answer, but there's an awful lot of it out
there, making for a huge task, and doing it is at least as complicated as
porting Linux software to Windows. That suggests that a Linux
compatibility layer/library might be a good idea, but there have been
several past attempts at that, and none seem to have got established. 

It's not obvious to me what VSI should concentrate on once OpenVMS is
working on x86 and customer transitions have become routine. It is clear
that should be some kind(s) of server work, but not which ones. 

Opinions? 

John