Throwing money at Cobol developers would be a small fraction of the company cost to convert to something else.
Unfortunately, to many in senior mgmt. positions either do not understand this or want to make a name for themselves in the company and/or for their resume.
Unfortunately, "Upgrade and integrate" vs. "rip-n-replace" decisions are often based on the past religion of those making and/or influencing the decisions.
> The world doesn't seem to care much for waiting for existing languages
> to come out with the next certified version or standard unless that
> language is in current new deployment use on new projects (again, I
> don't see COBOL or BASIC or other languages getting a look in here,
> apart from C / C++). There was talk of FORTRAN making a comeback
> but it's probably too late for that language even though it's later
> versions have some nice features
>
> New project get written in new / current languages it seems. Existing
> ones get worked on in the language they were created with or the
> data migrated away to a new platform. Wholesale re-writes onto the
> same platform are becoming less on older platforms like VMS
>
Ask any business unit or C level exec if they could care less what dev language or even what OS platform the IT dept. uses to address their rapidly changing business requirements.
Weak management and lax company standards are what allows IT developers to make decisions on their own about what cool development language of the day they use to build new company applications.
> Someone once posted on these forums way way back when the
> excitement of VMS going to x86 was announced that applications were
> just as important. They were barely heard over all the x86 excitement
> chatter but I think their view is extremely important
>
That’s certainly not what I have heard. OpenVMS Customers and promoters have been through the VAX-Alpha and Alpha to IA64 migrations, so I don't think there are many that would say Apps are not important.
Porting to X86-64 is like having the key to the main door in an apartment complex. However, once you get past the main door, there are many more keys required to go anywhere in the Apt complex.
> After VMS-x86-64, then what? We have to have something more than
> just trying to stop customers eyeing the door. x86 only gives them less
> of a reason, what else will we need to do to keep them and more
> importantly, attract new ones or perhaps get some back that left
> reluctantly because of no uncertainly at the time
>
Very simple - yes, add more functionality, but at the heart of future IT decision making, it is all about cost reduction and depending on the Customer, being able to more quickly address rapidly changing business requirements.
As I have mentioned before, the last 10 years was all about HW cost reduction, but the next 10 years is all about SW cost reductions.
Even public cloud computing, aka outsourcing, on the surface is about flexibility, adaptability (insert other hype terms), but like traditional outsourcing initiatives, at the heart of interest in public cloud / outsourcing solutions is senior management looking to reduce head count, because IT staffing is approx. 60+% of their IT budget.
Big IT shop I was under contract with in 2015 is re-writing all of their current Solaris/Oracle apps in their next generation middleware/web environment to be Oracle / IBM SW free because they can no longer afford $25K per core licensing +15% annual support for their middleware and DB environment. They had no issue with the functionality of Oracle/IBM sw, but they realized when their future designs were all based on "how many cores" for each component, they knew they had to change their future model. They also realized that they fell under the umbrella of many customers who only use a small fraction of the total functionality of the Oracle products.
To put this in perspective - a dual 4 core on each server X86-64 platform can be put together for say $25K. Even with current (very high) OpenVMS licensing including clustering, this might add another $25K. Oracle licensing with Weblogic and enterprise Server DB costs would be in the range of $500K+. With RAC clustering, this would likely increase to $750K. Then add your mandatory annual 15% Oracle support costs.
If you are a CIO and your job depends on reducing future IT costs, this is not a hard decision to make.
In other words, similar to why many Custs migrated to X86-64 hw, they realized that Oracle / IBM alternatives are available today for a fraction of the cost. These alternatives may not provide all of the functionality of the Oracle/IBM solutions, but they are "good enough" (sound familiar?).
Yes, in the short term, Oracle / IBM sw solutions on X86-64 support for OpenVMS is important because many Customers need to support what they have today.
However, to address your question of what comes next, OpenVMS needs to develop solutions that provide much lower costs, more stable solutions, increased security, increased automation, and making it easier for developers have OpenVMS as their preferred platform.
One consideration is to make it simpler and quicker for developers to develop solutions.
Yes, there is lots of open source work to do, but keep in mind that when developing on Windows/Linux/Unix clustering, add node/deletes, data consistency, availability, data replication, data partitioning/sharding is handled at the APPLICATION level. With OpenVMS, most (not all) of this is handled at the OS level. Hence, once there are more open source options, a future positioning of OpenVMS might be to allow developers to focus on their core responsibility in terms of code functionality and optimization and leave the availability/data partitioning/replication/node mgmt. to the OS layer.
> Cluster revamping? (multi-tiered clusters? perhaps?). Security surely
> must feature highly as an area of focus. It's an area that business will
> pay money for. Modernising the development? Getting an open
> source DB migrated and frame-working open source building on VMS
> so that it isn't anywhere as painful and 'different'
>
Mostly agree .. although one needs to be careful about stating "companies are willing to pay for additional security". Yes, everyone says they want more security, but until they experience a major issue, most companies focus on getting solutions out the door and worry about security later. That’s the unfortunate reality.
Having stated this, being perceived as not being a secure solution or not having security specific processes and technologies in place, is a big reason for companies to not choose your platform to address new requirements (even if the true reason is that the decision maker has adopted other platform religion).
> Where I used to work, they are moving away from VMS. Data is being
> migrated to an Oracle system. Even with VSI taking the reigns of VMS
> has not changed their mind. When I spoke with someone recently
> about staying on VMS, he told me 'We just want uniform platforms
> and products to support". They have an unlimited license with Oracle,
> it's no additional cost to bring things under another Oracle product and
> they gain by having one less 'other' vendor to pay :-( Uniformity saves
> money, doing what everyone else is doing saves money
>
I would suggest that company is behind in where the industry is heading.
Imho, SW cost reductions is where the 800lb gorilla opportunity is in the future - not fattening the gorilla to be 1000lbs which makes it even harder to manage.
> Bundled cost / offerings is very attractive for certain companies with
> large IT spends. These environments are where small players are
> getting crushed
>
The drive to reduce IT costs is increasing exponentially. The project I am on now (huge govt initiative) is looking at all sorts of hyper-converged infrastructure solutions from a number of smaller companies. These solutions are very, very impressive - think drag-n-drop of VM's between VMware, KVM and Hyper-V.
I do agree bundled cost / simplified offerings is key to the future success of companies like VSI. With Customers pulling their hair out with complex and ultra-high cost licensing schemes from Oracle, Microsoft, IBM etc., there is a huge opportunity for VSI OpenVMS to evolve to be a low cost LA option - Linux Alternative. (ok, I made that last term up, but it sounded cool).
:-)
Regards,
Kerry Main
Kerry dot main at starkgaming dot com