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Future Outlook for Compaq/OpenVMS

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by penguinsrule

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Greetings
I am a systems manager for a manufacturing environment, and I am responsible for all of the production machines. We are primarily running OpenVMS
on VAX and Alphas, and some NT servers.
I am concerned about the current state of OpenVMS and Compaq as a whole. Even though everyone tells me things about the fact that Compaq is porting VMS to the Itanium and everything is rosy, I still have several concerns:
* There are many CIO's who believe that OpenVMS is not a viable environment, WHY?
* If we have to port to another platform, then we have to look at other platforms, are there any others of you in this position?
* Compaq has been laying off their sales staff (including our sales rep), their field, and their support center staff (including people I've worked with for years)
As a result, my own satisfaction level with Compaq is lower than before. Has anyone else experienced anything similar?
* Has anyone else experienced any difficulties working with Compaq as a vendor? We have experienced a number of problems.
* In every respect Compaq is in trouble as a whole, while certain sections of their company are obviously top notch (like storage).
* There is a concern that Compaq will slowly kill OpenVMSthrough the port to Itanium just through the attrition of people on VAXes
that choose to go elsewhere, that the top customers will still be taken care of, but the rest will fall aside.
* There is concern that application development on OpenVMS ispretty well dead, and not much life to come.
* I've got 17 years of my life invested into OpenVMS, both as a former employee of Digital and as a customer. Has any of you experienced a transition elsewhere anytime soon?
THANKS

3 replies

by erikdr

Well, I'll try to answer from my position as an internal infrastructural consultant for a multinational. We have OS390 and Unix and Windows (and Compaq NSK) as our future-proof platforms, and quite a lot of other ones including OS/400 and OpenVMS. VMS was brought in both for a package and for our dial-in EBanking (as a front-end for OS390.)

Frankly spoken, more and more app development is being moved to a 'higher' level than the OS and the hardware. Basically, mostly J2EE in our case. In parallel, it makes sense to streamline the number of platforms we are using. So OpenVMS was being selected as one of the non-strategic, and will at some time (depends on package...) be phased out. The once essential qualities (communication power, loadbalancing) can now also be found in Unix implementations like Compaq Tru64 Unix, Solaris, HP and IBM.
So as to your other questions:
* Yes, my support staff is telling that VMS support at Compaq is getting more difficult. But they can still get whatthey really need.
* No feeling of 'killing', but yes, once a customer is on Itanium he could as well run TruUnix, HP-UX or whatever else on it.
* No reason to develop specifically for VMS, I guess. 4GL's, J2EE, DBMS - all that stuff runs equally on Unix as on VMS, so why lock oneself in to one platform?
* Transitions we do have here at times. They are always painful, but we try to transite towards a 'platform' which is a level higher than the OS or the hardware, and seems more future-proof.
Hope this helps,

- The Netherlands

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