[Vms.sig-hu] OpenVMS Pearl - Interview with Mark Gorham about the coming annoucment of VMS on Integrity servers (fwd)

[Fodor Zsuzsa]

---------- Továbbított levél ----------
Dátum: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 08:51:08 -0500
Feladó: Skonetski, Susan <susan.skonetski at hp.com>
Címzett: Skonetski, Susan <susan.skonetski at hp.com>
Tárgy: OpenVMS Pearl - Interview with Mark Gorham about the coming 
annoucment of VMS on Integrity servers

http://www.interex.com/hpworldnews/hpw501/news3.jsp

At press time, Hewlett-Packard planned to announce in January its
long-awaited version of OpenVMS that runs on Itanium-based Integrity
servers. We spoke with Mark Gorham, vice president for HP's OpenVMS
Systems Division. He is responsible for worldwide engineering, customer
satisfaction, quality, partner management and business management 
of the
OpenVMS Systems product portfolio. 

In addition to porting OpenVMS to the new Itanium-based Integrity
servers, Gorham and his team are bringing new Java and .NET 
integration
technology to the OpenVMS platform. Gorham is also responsible for
programs to grow HP revenue and improve customer satisfaction. He is 
the
BCS (Business Critical Systems) Executive Champion for more than 70
customers worldwide, the BCS Country Champion for the Nordic 
Countries,
and the BCS Government Segment Champion. Gorham is currently 
working in
the Enterprise Storage and Servers (ESS) "War Room," helping to drive
end-to-end business models and process improvements that 
systemically
improve the worldwide business performance for ESS. 

Q: Tell me about the OpenVMS 8.2 announcement this month. What are 
you
announcing, exactly, and why is HP so excited about it?
Mark: Well, you are right. We are very excited about OpenVMS version
8.2. We are announcing the first production-quality release of OpenVMS
on Integrity Servers. In addition, it also runs on Alpha-but Integrity
is the really exciting point here. Integrity has been touted as the
future for business-critical systems and for high-end systems in
general. We're bringing in the full OpenVMS environment over to the
Integrity systems. So it's a big announcement, the result of over three
years of work, and we are very, very excited about it. 

Q: Is your expectation that the majority of your customers will move to
Integrity or that they will mix them?
Well, what we have in OpenVMS is a very elegant, two-piece technology
adoption model. The first piece is what we call clustering, and we allow
mixed architecture clustering. So I guess the answer from a clustering
standpoint is we don't expect people to throw out their Alpha systems
and go over to Integrity systems. Mixed-architecture clustering allows
them to gradually add Integrity systems into their environment at the
rate that they choose, and the cluster acts as a single system. As I
said, it is a very elegant and non-intrusive way of being able to add
technology. We did this for VAX to Alpha. It turns out that probably
over 80 percent of the OpenVMS customer base uses clusters, and this 
is
an extremely popular way of moving forward. 

I guess the other elegant technology adoption model is that we are
architecting list release from one source pool for both Alpha and
Integrity. For us it is recompile, re-link and test, and then you can
deploy our code, our OpenVMS code, on Alpha and on Integrity. And this
is true for ISVs. We're seeing ISVs very happy with this because they
are able to, with one source pool, support two platforms. And for
customers who have custom code, it's the same thing. We compile, re-
link
and test-so very, very elegant-allowing them to adopt the technology,
not trash and throw out. 

Q: Is OpenVMS growing these days?
OpenVMS has been growing for the last year. We've had four quarters 
of
either single- or double-digit revenue growth. It's been quite exciting
for us. We did have a couple of tough years when we announced we 
were
going to Itanium. We had a lot of customer concern about "will Itanium
work" and "will we be able to get there?" And then about six months
after that, we were purchased by HP and there were a lot of questions
about will they support OpenVMS. 

Right now I think all of that concern is behind the customer. We have a
lot of very happy customers. A lot of people [are] convinced that HP is
doing a great job supporting OpenVMS, and HP is. And we have a 
number of
new customers using OpenVMS for the first time. So I think, as a result
of that, we have renewed confidence as a result of the things that we 
do
very well. We're probably the leading disaster tolerant environment in
the industry, the high availability platform in the industry, the most
secure platform in the industry. And every year we consistently rank as
the number-one environment in terms of quality. So for customers who
value that, OpenVMS is a really great platform. 

Q: What does the NonStop group think about your claims about
reliability?
I think Pauline [Nist, vice president and general manager of the 
NonStop
Enterprise Division] has a very nice solution as well. They look at
disaster recovery and redundancy a little bit differently than we do.
They have an excellent solution if you need true fault tolerance and
actually have pretty good disaster tolerant computing too. But I think
if you talk to our customers and look at both the abilities we have from
a disaster tolerance perspective and the total cost of ownership, we
have a very loyal base, and that following has a loyal base. So I think
we do different things and the same kind of thing from an availability
and disaster tolerant perspective. 

Q: What are some of the biggest myths or misconceptions about 
OpenVMS?
One funny one and one not funny one: The funny one is that people 
think
that when we talk about VMS or OpenVMS, they think it's two different
things. They think we did something different when we changed the 
name.
We changed the name about nine or ten years ago not because we did
anything different, but because we didn't. We changed it because there
was a big push towards Open Systems, and OpenVMS has a huge 
amount of
standardization built into it. We continue to build a lot of that
standardization into it, so the marketing guys said, "Hey, it would be a
great idea to call it OpenVMS" because it is truly so open. And now
we'll always have people saying, "I'm running VMS; what do I have to 
do
to get to OpenVMS?" The answer is, "Jeez, you're there already." 

The somewhat serious misconception is that we do have a lot of
competitors out there saying, "HP's not supporting OpenVMS; it's going
away, it's gone, it's over." And that couldn't be further from the
truth. And whenever we get to our customers and show them our road 
map
of what we're doing, they are very impressed and very pleased. 

Q: Who are some of your bigger or more interesting customers, and 
what
applications are they running on OpenVMS?
We have several sets of larger customers. I would say in the health 
care
area, Cerner is probably our biggest value-added reseller. Cerner has a
hospital IT system that they sell to thousands of major hospitals around
the world, and they are a great partner and they have very excellent
growth with OpenVMS over the last several years. We've really been 
doing
good business with them. Probably the biggest U.S.-based health care
customer we have is the Veterans Administration. And we just 
announced,
I think, earlier this year about a billion dollars worth of business
over ten years that we are doing with them. So that's probably the
biggest health care customer we have. 

We also have a number of customers in the Stock Exchange. I think
between Pauline's group and my group, we have almost all of the top
exchanges in the world. The Swift Stock Exchange has been a great
partner and customer for years. Deutsche [Telekom] a great partner 
and
customer for years. And International Securities Exchange is the first
fully electronic exchange running in the United States, and Danny Friel
is the CEO. He has just been a great supporter of OpenVMS and of HP. 
So
some big, big partners in the exchanges. 

We have numbers of very secure, highly available government 
customers,
but I can't tell you their names because I would have to shoot you, and
we have many major telecommunications partners and customers. I 
would
say that probably the biggest one is Logica CMG, and they do a lion's
share of the world's cellular message systems, so they use OpenVMS -
so a
very good partner. 

Q: OK. Can you tell me a bit about yourself and your career-where 
you've
come from and so on?
I've come from the Digital Compaq-HP merger areas. I've been in the
companies for 23-plus years and in a number of software and finance 
and
services and engineering management jobs. I guess if I think back to 
my
bio, I have a formal degree in theoretical mathematics, I have an MBA
from Harvard, I have four kids who are getting too old too fast [and a]
lovely wife. I love to ski; I love to scuba dive; I love to fish.