[Info-vax] VSI strategy for OpenVMS

[Richard Maher]

On 12/09/2021 7:18 pm, John Dallman wrote:
> 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
> 

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