[Info-vax] Comment on the future of OpenVMS

[Keith Parris]

JF Mezei wrote:
> VMS's only remaining commercial value is the support revenues from the
> remaining installed base. 

Services (support) is not the only source of revenue. HP still sells a 
lot of VMS hardware and software and layered products, not to mention 
storage and networking hardware for those VMS systems.

> HP's own Gartner study did mention that VMS
> customers do not have much loyalty to HP and may switch to any other
> vendor as they move off VMS.

I believe this is a mis-characterization of what Gartner said.

VMS customers are loyal.

Gartner said:
1) "If there is already investment in rival Unix versions," and
2) "HP has 'inherited' an Alpha user through the Compaq acquisition," 
and if, as a result of that, it happens that "there is limited loyalty 
to the company"
then "vendors such as IBM or Sun Microsystems will be better-positioned 
to benefit."

> with a scaled down el-cheapo VMS maintenance team in India

This is an insult to the hundreds of fine VMS Engineering folks in 
India, and is uncalled-for.

> And from a buyer's point of view, there is no reason for anyone to buy
> VMS anymore. There might have been when VMS had a whole slew of very
> valuable engineers and people like Sue who knew the customers personally.

There are still very valid reasons for people to buy VMS. It can do 
things no other OS platform can. I just got back from visiting what may 
eventually become the largest stock exchange in the world, and they're 
new as an OpenVMS customer, moving from HP-UX to OpenVMS 
disaster-tolerant clusters.

VMS still has a whole slew of valuable engineers working on VMS. And 
Sujatha is doing her best to become acquainted with a lot of customers 
personally.

> However they've all been replaced by commodity drones with just a
> handful of experienced people left. So there is no value left in it.

Even among the engineers from India whom you deprecate are people with 
14 years' experience with VMS.

> Sorry to dash your hopes, but VMS will remain with HP until it is small
> enough to be sold off to some small outfit, just like PDP11 stuff had
> been sold off to Mentec. And it will be a couple more years before it
> happens.

Gartner Group says "With at least three future generations in the 
Itanium road map (Tukwila, Paulson and Kittson), we expect HP to 
continue to build and sell Itanium servers for many years to come. As a 
result, OpenVMS (and other OSs) should be fully supported on Itanium 
servers through 2020 at least.”

2020 minus 2009 is 11, not two.

And of course there's no technical reason why VMS couldn't be ported to 
another CPU architecture in the future. One goal of the Itanium port was 
to make it easier for such future ports, as the developers were familiar 
with the history of VAX and Alpha at the time and thus anticipated that 
this need would arise again in the future.