[Info-vax] relaunch or legacy

[Gérard Calliet]

I hope that the year 2022 will be a decisive step in the recovery of VMS.

I would like to clarify a few points about my personal involvement in 
France and the French situation.

I am proud to have contributed to the transformation of the DECUS heir 
users club (hp-interex France) into the VMSgenerations association 
focused on VMS. It is a contribution to a collaborative work that goes 
far beyond my own contribution, and I am filled with gratitude and honor 
towards all the members that this club allows me to meet.

This club is a success because it responds to a need and relies on 
resources that have only been allowed to emerge.  All of us in this club 
share the idea that other clubs of this type should emerge everywhere, 
specialized in VMS and contemporary to its recovery.

Since the creation of the club, I have made a point of restricting my 
personal communications, and I would like to make it clear that 
everything that has been published so far under the name of 
VMSgenerations has always been the result of collaborative work in the 
association.

The current situation in France and the behavior of VSI lead me to 
seriously doubt my work. VSI rigorously ignores the work of our 
association - except for courteous answers without real content. The 
vast majority of French customers are very uncomfortable with VSI's 
commercial policy, I don't know any customer who is seriously 
considering a port to x86 and the general opinion of customers and 
consultants is that VMS will disappear in the short or medium term.

Having worked on the durability of VMS can therefore appear as very bad 
advice, and, for those who have committed themselves to it, at the very 
least as an investment with no return on investment.

Unless there is a drastic reorientation of VSI's strategy, I am 
convinced, like many others, that it will fail in the short or medium 
term. It becomes ethically very difficult for an independent consultant 
to advise to stay under VMS.

I would like to be wrong. But it is the same analysis that made me 
anticipate the recovery of 2014, the contribution to the transformation 
of DECUS France into VMS generations, both validated by experience, and 
the prediction of a failure for VSI when I became aware of its strategy. 
My professional relations can testify to my anticipation of the current 
crisis as early as 2014.

The idea of a VMS takeover was great. Its implementation was completely 
disappointing.

The investors' intuition was right: the intrinsic value of VMS had the 
potential to become productive again in the new context of 2014. But 
that intuition was not pursued, and VMS's value and contextual 
consideration were forgotten.

What is the new context? The appearance of sustainability in the 
economic landscape is the beginning of a development that can only get 
bigger and bigger. For the IT world, this appearance radically 
transforms the consideration of what has been called "legacy systems" 
until now.

VMS was not conceived at a time when the concept of sustainability 
existed. But its founding concepts of systemicity, backward 
compatibility, local control and reasoned scalability meet the new 
concepts of locality, sobriety and reusability.

The VMS revival is therefore an ideal laboratory for experimenting with 
the new deal as regards (misnamed) legacy systems. Nothing trivial here, 
because everything has to be reinvented in both purely technical and 
economic terms.

It is worth noting in passing that the main investor had already 
invested in legacy systems and is interested in green development. His 
intuition did not come from nowhere.

But the implementation fell into all the (predictable) mistakes of a 
relaunch that does not respect the specifics of what to relaunch and 
when and where it is relaunched. VMS was relaunched as one would have 
done for a sub-brand of Apple: a flagship product (x86), maximization of 
immediate profits (the "clearing house" concept exposed by Terry 
Holmes), no attention to the temporalities of the existing base, 
unshakeable confidence in the brand (no marketing, no criticism of past 
business practices).

Whereas a relaunch requires intelligent recovery from the previous long 
time, transmission of positive achievements and criticism of previous 
mistakes, and adaptation to what allows recovery in the new context. And 
what VSI has systematically left out is the crucial question of the 
transfer of skills and has completely ignored the essential need for 
stability of the majority of clients, which explains their loyalty to VMS.

The disastrous results are there.

The centralization of profits discourages intermediaries, at least in 
France, who were the best advocates of VMS. Only the big international 
consulting companies resist, for which VSI has favors that border on 
abusive competition. The exclusive supplier discourages non-VSI open 
source development companies.

The focus on a single target (x86) that would be the sign of renewal 
diverts attention from the long-cycle needs of the customer base. It 
dries up the general investment, drains the cash flow and is one of the 
causes of the product price increase. We find ourselves in the 
extraordinary circumstance of customers paying for a solution that is 
only on the horizon, a solution that they will probably not adopt, 
because the current conditions of use of the product will discourage the 
general management from using VMS.

But the most serious thing, which was structurally foreseeable, is the 
impoverishment of the Boston center, a founding engineering in the 
imbalance with the new effective center of decision and profit in 
Europe. The Boston offices have disappeared, the data center has been 
outsourced, and most of the key managers are non-VMSians. The Boston 
center is a victim of the same trend that took place before 2013: very 
high quality poses immediate profitability problems, and the trend is to 
go offshore to reduce costs. It is easier to invest in integration, 
service, which will be reconvertible in case of failure into external 
porting services (alliance with Sector7).

There is the problem that Digital had encountered: complex balancing 
between decision centers in the world. What we are seeing is a gradual 
underground takeover from the European center, closer to the investor, 
both by reducing resources and by appointing people close to the 
investor to take charge. Seen from Europe, the billing goes through the 
Teracloud entity for an officially American company, whose choice of 
managers seems to come from Europe. Thus the so-called "VSI" entity is 
really difficult to define, let alone its real strategies.

But the root of all the problems is that of the deep meaning of a 
relaunch, which is lost from sight. If the essential importance of 
fundamental engineering is underestimated, we move from the register of 
transmission to that of inheritance. There is a difference between 
allowing transmission between generations and pilfering from 
grandparents' property, or violently succeeding them during their 
lifetime. This calls into question the very core of the possibility of 
VMS revival.

VMS is not (for the moment) a legacy system. The possibility of its 
revival is part of the new economic trend of sustainable development in 
the IT world. The excellence of VMS is passed on FROM THE LIVING of VMS, 
which has nothing to do with a legacy. It is true that making this 
possible is much more complex than simply doing legacy management.

For the moment VSI is only organizing itself within the classic 
framework of operating a legacy system, which allows it to wait serenely 
for the end of VMS. One of the consequences of this situation is the 
inevitable reproduction of a conflict between old and new - nothing less 
innovative than the conflict between old and new -. This explains the 
chaotic competition between the Boston pole and the Melmo pole.

This analysis is anything but recent. This failure of a strong intuition 
because of the application of classic but inadequate solutions has been 
mine since 2014. In the current situation, I only have concrete 
confirmation of this.

What are the concrete consequences for the VMS ecosystem? Either VSI 
will empower the ecosystem to gain confidence in a "revival of the 
revival," and a whole complex and very promising future is in store. It 
is not difficult to predict that all players other than VSI will respond 
with great enthusiasm to any proposal to collaborate with VSI, and the 
wealth of inventiveness and excellence is widely available throughout 
the VMS ecosystem. Or VSI can continue on its current path that will 
make VMS a classic legacy system.

In both cases, the role of intermediaries and user clubs is 
professionally important: each customer will be able to make the best 
possible choices thanks to these expertise circuits: porting, freezing 
in the existing system, modernization under VMS...

This confirms us all in our efforts... and in our expectations.

It remains to give a few points that seem vital to me in the first 
instance for a better business climate with VSI:

VSI must have the humility to organize a thorough market analysis, which 
has never been done

VSI must listen to its customers, work in concert with user organizations

VSI must be transparent about its organization (national and 
international), its financial flows, the cost/productivity/profit ratio 
of its various business units, its investment ratio per business unit

I would like to remind of what I said in my introduction. Here I am 
speaking only in my own name, or rather according to the service 
objectives of my company. According to my analysis, this is a worrying 
period for VMS, and I have experienced the complete deafness of VSI, 
including in the presence of larger entities other than my company 
alone. Having contributed to engaging other entities or clients in my 
assessment of the future of VMS, it seems natural to me to develop as 
objectively as possible the position of my company.

Once again, to conclude, it is in any case a long and fruitful time with 
VMS that lies ahead. Whether it's a relaunch or a classic "legacy" 
operation, VMS will remain an invaluable tool for its users for a long 
time to come.

Perhaps the bet is only for the investor: will he be smarter than the 
trends and able to understand and develop his first intuition? In this 
case VMS will be an impressive innovative revival. Otherwise it will be 
an instructive experience for the emergent domain of sustainability in IT.

-- 
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