From: SMTP%"Info-VAX-Request@Mvb.Saic.Com" 30-SEP-1994 17:05:36.86 To: EVERHART CC: Subj: Re: Digital Insists that VMS Has No Future From: Jerry Leichter X-Newsgroups: comp.os.vms Subject: Re: Digital Insists that VMS Has No Future Message-ID: <9409300258.AA27703@uu3.psi.com> Date: Thu, 29 Sep 94 22:49:35 EDT Organization: Info-Vax<==>Comp.Os.Vms Gateway X-Gateway-Source-Info: Mailing List Lines: 670 To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com Someone forwarded this to me. I think it provides one perspective on DEC's view of VMS and its future. As always, one of DEC's biggest problems is that not only doesn't the right hand know what the left is doing, but one of them is trying to do abstract art while the other is cleaning out the fishtank - and all the while one foot is doing ballet, the other is doing roundhouse kicks, the mouth is busy talking, the ears are doing anything but listening, and so on, and so forth. -- Jerry The Uniform Resource Locator for this document is: http://montagar.metronet.com/www/dfwlug/openvms_world.txt Positioning OpenVMS in an Open Client/Server World: Issues/Answers August 15th, 1994 Ken Steinhardt, Group Marketing Manager, OpenVMS Systems (Ken Steinhardt @BXB) Digital Equipment Corporation 85 Swanson Road, BXB1 Boxboro, MA 01719 In this document, I would like to provide some commentary to address several issues that have been frequently heard when Digital has proposed OpenVMS as part of a Digital solution. These issues are: - 1) Is Digital committed to OpenVMS? - 2) Is OpenVMS "Open" - 3) If OpenVMS is Open, then why should I buy it rather than the Open Systems from your competitors? - 4) If I am an existing Digital VAX customer, how and when should I move from VAX to Alpha AXP? 1) Is Digital committed to OpenVMS? Based upon Digital's own actions and statements, we can understand why a customer might feel the need to ask this question. Until this past October 12th, 1993, Digital had not announced any significant new directions for OpenVMS for quite some time, and had in fact made major public announcements regarding our directions for UNIX and WindowsNT. While we are very proud of our two newest "children" (DEC OSF/1 and WindowsNT), it should not be taken to imply that we love our other child (OpenVMS) any less. Digital is committed to OpenVMS, and to continued enhancements for OpenVMS. When Digital decided to port OpenVMS to Alpha AXP, it was necessary to "freeze" OpenVMS functionality at version 5.5-2 in order to insure consistency and compatibility for our existing 10 million OpenVMS customers. Digital was dedicated to providing the existing wealth and breadth of OpenVMS functionality onto a brand new architecture, Alpha AXP. In effect, Digital was doing the hard part, so that our customers could experience the assimilation of a brand new computer architecture with unparalleled ease. OpenVMS has now achieved functional equivalence between the implementation on Alpha AXP and the implementation on VAX, ahead of schedule. OpenVMS version 6.1 for both architectures (Alpha AXP and VAX) is now available! Thus, unlike the last two years when our efforts were focused on providing this functional equivalence between architectures, it is now time to again EXPAND OpenVMS capabilities. Some of the new capabilities that are planned for future release on OpenVMS AXP were "program" announced on October 12th, 1993, and further highlighted on April 12th, 1994. They include: - Full 64-bit data address capability. - A brand new file system for OpenVMS that will support the gigantic files, high update volumes, and rapid recovery that 21st century applications will require to be viable. This new file system will provide new features that lend themselves extremely well to supporting Business Critical Open Client/Server Computing, such as: - A new approach to how data is physically written to disks that could provide up to 10X performance improvement over how data is written to disk today. This new approach, based upon Log Structured technologies developed over the last five years at the University of California at Berkely, may revolutionize the high volume OLTP market. - Incremental backup to decrease both the amount of physical data stored off-line and the completion time for backup procedures. - Fast, tunable online backup facility to decrease system management effort, increase user productivity, and eliminate a potential source of application downtime. Backup can occur online, enabling continuous system operation! - All the availability features of today's OpenVMS Clusters, with improved application performance. - High performance backup and integrated support for Polycenter storage management tools to manage terabytes of online and off-line data, decreasing the cost of large data volume management. - Investment protection for both end-user customers and Digital Business Partners by allowing existing RMS-based applications to run with no changes AND alongside today's OpenVMS file system. - A new, Windows-based Graphical User Interface for system management and administration functions, allowing a single PC to manage one or more OpenVMS Cluster systems. This will become the model for OpenVMS system management for the future. - Extended OpenVMS Cluster capabilities, including unique disaster tolerant support utilizing T3 technology and ATM technology, and low cost OpenVMS Clusters based upon SCSI devices. In addition, many other new functions and capabilities are planned for future releases of OpenVMS, and they can be shared with customers and prospects through Digital's Proprietary Information Disclosure (PID) process. Major industry consultants, such as IDC, and Aberdeen Group, rate today's deliverable OpenVMS environment as the best relative to all competitive offerings for providing the availability, integrity, security, reliability, manageability, and scalability required to implement business-critical computing solutions. Gartner Group has recently positioned OpenVMS as the standard for Cluster functionality, against which all other systems will be measured. OpenVMS will extend its functionality with these new capabilities. With OpenVMS functionality now coupled with the industry-leading performance and price/performance of Alpha AXP, Digital is in a unique position to provide value to our customers today, and in the future. OpenVMS continues to represent the overwhelming majority of Digital's sales revenue. While Digital sees significant growth potential for our excellent UNIX and WindowsNT solutions, it would be financially irresponsible to not pave the way for a bright OpenVMS future, and new business growth for OpenVMS. 2) I will only buy Open Systems. Isn't UNIX the only Open System? Isn't "OpenVMS" an oxymoron? Customers that demand Open Systems tend to fall into two very distinct categories: - Those that seek the business benefits that "Open Systems" may provide. - Those that have a specific technology agenda and bias. We believe that the majority fall into the first category. This belief has recently been substantiated by a Deloit-Touche survey of over 400 CIOs from the U.S. and Canada, which was published in the July 1st, 1994 issue of Datamation. These CIOs stated the most important issues to them for Open Systems were: Portability (65%) Development Tool Functionality (59%) System and Network Management Tools (59%) Compliance with Open Standards (55%) Security and Continuity (54%) Must be a UNIX environment (25%) The key to success in todays Open Systems market is often more dependent on the DEFINITION of Open Systems that the customer ultimately perceives will achieve their business objectives, and less dependent on the technology. Digital encourages our representatives to work with you to form a common definition for the business value of Open Systems, and propose whatever technology can meet those Open Systems business objectives. While the business objectives for Open Systems will vary, they tend to fall into the following key points: PORTABILITY - Can I develop and deploy applications that will run on other platforms and other vendor platforms without change? - Will your solution support user interfaces that are identical across other platforms and other vendor platforms, so that my people do not have to be retrained? INTEROPERABILITY - Can I integrate your solution easily with my existing I.T. infrastructure and preserve my existing investments in potential client systems and server systems? - Can I share data, applications, and resources easily across all my platforms? And most importantly, ECONOMIC VALUE - As a result of providing Open portability and interoperability, can I deploy low cost, commodity priced hardware platforms for my applications now and without limitation into the future? - By virtue of these open capabilities, can I invest in products today that will insure the lowest cost of integration or transition as new technologies emerge? The problem has been that all too often, computer vendors have not defined Open Systems from this customer perspective, but rather from what one might call, The Universal Computer Vendor Definition of Open Systems, which is as follows: The Universal Computer Vendor Open Systems Definition O-pen (oh'-pen) adj. A term used by computer sales and marketing people to describe products that they would like you to buy (e. g. their own) Pro-pri-e-tar-y (pro-pri'-e-ter-ee) adj. A term used by computer sales and marketing people to describe products that they don't want you to buy (e.g. anyone else's) Digital architects OpenVMS in the spirit of the IEEE base definition for POSIX (1003.0), which stresses PORTABILITY and INTEROPERABILITY. All major Digital offerings will strive to adhere to the major industry standards, both formal and defacto, to provide multi-vendor portability and interoperability, and to facilitate Open Client/Server computing. The organization that has probably done the most to further Open Systems, and to provide a customer-oriented, non-vendor-dominated forum for the definition of Open Systems technologies for delivering the true business benefits of Open Systems to customers, is the X/Open Consortium, ltd., based in Europe. The most rigid, formal tests of Open Systems compliance today come from X/Open, who themselves have now obtained the trade name for UNIX. Known previously as the X/Open Portability Guide (XPG), and now as merely "XPG", XPG is a suite of thousands of tests for Open Systems compliance, constantly growing in complexity and level, that verify Open Systems full conformance. Most major industry standard open technologies and definitions, such as POSIX compliance, ANSI language compliance, OSF/DCE compliance, etc. are all SUBSETS of the XPG tests. X/Open is where all of the good work that is done by the multitude of organizations that develop Open standards (IEEE, OSF, ANSI, etc.) get integrated together for a TOTAL Open Systems environment that adds value for the customer who chooses to deploy real Open Systems. OpenVMS today (for both VAX and Alpha AXP) has become the only significant non-UNIX operating system to PASS all 5000 tests associated with XPG3, and thus achieve the XPG3 base "brand" from X/Open, attesting to it having passed the definitive test for Open technology. Digital has just recently reached an important milestone by achieving XPG4 base branding (the newest, and most stringent Open conformance test ever, over 11,000 individual tests!) with OpenVMS version 6.1. Thus, Digital has achieved X/Open XPG4 branding AHEAD of several notable UNIX offerings in the market, such as AIX from IBM and SOLARIS from Sun Microsystems. Digital's achievements to date in this area have prompted the following quote, directly from George Shaffer, the COO of X/Open: "DEC went through a Stephen King-class nightmare of tests to get XPG3 branding for OpenVMS. There is no historical precedent for anything but a UNIX operating system passing them. THIS BREAKS THE CORRELATION BETWEEN UNIX AND THE TERM 'OPEN SYSTEM'". The true meaning of this statement to me is that while most UNIX systems in the market (including DEC OSF/1 and Ultrix, of course) continue to provide a platform from which to build true Open Systems, OpenVMS has uniquely joined that elite group of Open Systems, as attested to by the organization that has probably done the most to build credibility for UNIX as an Open System. No other entity (Digital included) has as much credibility as does X/Open to make such a proclamation, OR TO CHALLENGE IT. Then is OpenVMS truly "Open", and able to deliver "Open" benefits to customers? Virtually ALL of the major cross-vendor open technologies that have existed in the UNIX world and that facilitate the development and deployment of portable applications and interfaces exist NOW on OpenVMS (such as POSIX 1003.1, 1003.2 1003.1b (formerly POSIX 1003.4), ANSI language conformance, ANSI SQL conformance, TCP/IP, DCE, MOTIF, etc.). OpenVMS has passed the Open Systems "acid tests", such as XPG3, XPG4, and FIPS 151-2. OSF/DCE is rapidly becoming the industry open standard for the creation, use, and maintenance of Open Client/Server applications in heterogeneous, multi-vendor environments. Many people are unaware that Digital (from OpenVMS!) contributed 4 of the 7 components of DCE to OSF. In recognition of the growing interest in OSF/DCE among companies that are building distributed Open Client/Server applications, the DCE Runtime Services are now provided directly with the OpenVMS operating system at NO COST! If the customer's application was designed to be "open" and portable between different UNIX systems, it is now portable to OpenVMS. It also means that a customer can now develop "Open", portable applications on OpenVMS that will run without change on most major UNIX systems. Did OpenVMS offer this degree of portability and "Open" capabilities three years ago? No! Does it today? YES!!!!!! Does anyone other than Digital believe this? Yes! IDC has published a comparison of major operating systems and how well they support both defacto and industry standard technologies that facilitate developing and deploying Open Systems. OpenVMS is the only non-UNIX system that is listed as supporting virtually all of the major components, on par with OSF/1 and all major competitive UNIX offerings. In the December 6, 1993 issue of COMPUTERWORLD, there is a published survey of how 164 I.S. managers rated the major "Open" offerings in the market. OpenVMS was rated right in the thick of the pack with competitive UNIX offerings, and was actually rated slightly MORE open than some competitive UNIX products. OSF/1 lead the pack with the highest rating, and OpenVMS and WindowsNT were the only non-UNIX products that were even considered for evaluation as "Open" in this report. As testimony to the viability of Digital's strategy to take the previously "closed and proprietary" VAX/VMS into the world of Open Systems, both HP (with MPE/ix) and IBM (with OpenEdition MVS) have announced FUTURE releases of software that will (in the FUTURE...) support major Open components, such as POSIX, DCE, XPG3, and so on. This is good news for Digital and our customers, as it validates Digital strategy, and highlights the importance of choice in the market. So, have real customers successfully ported Open applications from our competitor's UNIX offerings to production deployment on OpenVMS with minimal effort? YES!!!! Have real, new customers replaced their non-Digital UNIX systems with OpenVMS systems? YES!!! Have real customers taken staff that had exclusively non-Digital UNIX experience and successfully introduced OpenVMS into their I.S. environments without user retraining? YES!!! Have real customers that previously had mandated "UNIX ONLY" policy in both word and actual practice (non-Digital) introduced OpenVMS successfully into their I.S. environments? YES!!!!!! Are there real customers that are buying DEC OSF/1 AND WindowsNT AND OpenVMS to implement Open Client/Server computing? YES!!!!! Have Digital's UNIX products (Ultrix and DEC OSF/1) offered these same "Open" capabilities all along? YES!!!! Are all the major third-party Open database and Open 4GL products available on OpenVMS? YES! The good news is that unlike the competition, Digital offers a Universal Platform that runs three strategic operating systems (DEC OSF/1, OpenVMS, and WindowsNT), and support programs that allow for change between them. The world is moving to Open Systems, and all of Digital's offerings are ready. Digital declares that the operating systems wars are over, as Digital uniquely offers our customers choice and flexibility that our competition cannot match. It is Digital's customers who have won the war. The Facts: - OpenVMS has been retroactively re-engineered to support ALL of the major industry Open Systems technologies that facilitate the development and deployment of Open Systems in AN IDENTICAL manner to how it would have been done on UNIX. Until February of 1992 when POSIX was first introduced, and July of 1992 when XPG3 base branding was achieved, OpenVMS DID NOT support this capability. While new OPEN applications can now be introduced in EXACTLY the same way that they would have been on UNIX, pre-existing PROPRIETARY applications continue to be supported on OpenVMS in EXACTLY the way that they have been, with full investment protection. Now that OpenVMS has achieved XPG4 base branding (AHEAD of several popular UNIX offerings), it is technically as Open as the best alternative Open Systems in the market. - OpenVMS products (H/W, O/S, S/W) are now PRICED on Open Systems price curves, providing the ultimate true present economic benefit of Open Systems. Until the Alpha AXP announcements in November 1992, this goal had not yet been fully realized for OpenVMS. - OpenVMS source code is now available to be licensed to any party that chooses to. Until February 1992, it had been CLOSED and PROPRIETARY to Digital. - Real customers, with real Open Systems mandates, have recently made OpenVMS purchases, and have deployed OpenVMS as true Open Systems. Digital believes in Open Systems. Depending upon the definition of Open Systems value that you define, Digital should have a very viable response, if not with OpenVMS, certainly with either DEC OSF/1 or WindowsNT. We acknowledge that VAX/VMS in the past WAS NOT OPEN by most definitions of the term, but that at great effort and expense Digital has retroactively taken what was closed and proprietary in the past into the Open Systems world of the present and future, while protecting our customer's investments. In 1992 VAX/VMS was renamed to OpenVMS for three very specific reasons: - It now supported the major Open technologies for portability and interoperability. - Source code could now be licensed from Digital. - Despite OpenVMS on VAX becoming functionally equivalent to OpenVMS on Alpha AXP, the VAX instruction set is quite different from the Alpha AXP instruction set, they are different hardware architectures. Thus, it did not make sense to use the term "VAX" when referring to VMS on Alpha AXP. What was VAX/VMS on VAX is now OpenVMS on VAX, ever since version 5.5-2. Customers did not have to change ANYTHING. Now, with version 6.1, OpenVMS is OpenVMS, whether on Alpha AXP or VAX. 3) So, if OpenVMS is "Open", why should I choose OpenVMS rather than an Open System from your competition? First, the obvious: Superior Performance, and Superior Price/Performance. For commercial applications, OpenVMS systems have set the current World Record performance for applications as diverse as OLTP (the TPC-A benchmark), to the real-world applications from almost every major independent software company whose products run on Alpha AXP, to the Datamation batch Sort benchmark. At each performance point, Digital has established absolute industry leading price/performance. Digital OpenVMS systems currently hold the TOP 5 positions for price/performance for the TPC-A benchmark, and 7 of the top 10 positions! Even for technical applications, such as for a very popular third-party mechanical CAD product, OpenVMS products are the leading platform performers. Next, and more importantly, functional uniqueness that provides specific customer added value: OpenVMS derives its greatest competitive differentiation where customers will deploy applications for business-critical computing. Business-critical computing is typified by applications that MUST, ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY provide continuous operation, and where functional capabilities for availability, dependability, system integrity, data integrity, security, and scalability are paramount. Business-critical computing environment examples might be those where the customer systems must interact with THEIR customers and suppliers (such as communications systems, point-of-sale retail systems, customer order inquiry), or where any system downtime would have dramatic negative impact (financial funds transfer, military logistics, power grid operations). Not all customers or applications will require "business-critical" capabilities. For those that do require these "business-critical" capabilities, OpenVMS leads the industry. How does OpenVMS differ from the competition in delivering "business-critical" computing? Digital has gone to great lengths to provide the ability to deploy Open, Portable applications that can take advantage of OpenVMS unique features that DO NOT compromise the "Openness" and Portability of the customer's applications. OpenVMS cluster functions are "transparent" to Open applications, in that unlike most systems from the competition, Open applications DO NOT have to be modified to take advantage of OpenVMS unique capabilities for high availability, fault tolerance, disaster tolerance, load balancing, extended scalability, and fail-over. Only Digital's OpenVMS today offers the ability to merge these business-critical capabilities with Open applications. Who says that OpenVMS provides exceptional functionality? - Gartner Group, in their recent base definition for Cluster functionality, where they have chosen OpenVMS as the most functional yardstick against which all others will be measured. "There is not another cluster in the market that has OpenVMS Clusters functionality. I can run a completely Open shop with OpenVMS as the operating system. I can run it easier with OpenVMS than the IBM RS/6000 or SUN operating systems, everyone's favorite examples of Open systems. No one in the UNIX world has the OpenVMS combination of real openness and real functionality." - Wes Melling, Gartner Group, May 1994 - IDC, who in their continual multi-vendor functional comparison charts have consistently rated OpenVMS as the most functional operating system in the market. - Aberdeen Group, who in their Cluster functional evaluation not only rated OpenVMS #1, but rated OpenVMS #1 in 23 of the 24 individual categories. So what about the 25% of the market (according to the Deloit-Touche study) that will only consider UNIX proposals? Digital is moving quickly to provide many of the Cluster functions that exist in OpenVMS today on DEC OSF/1 UNIX. Existing DEC OSF/1 high availability features have been extended this spring as the first "Cluster" capabilities were delivered on DEC OSF/1, with many additional capabilities being phased in over time. As the inventors and industry leaders in "Clusters" (all analysts agree), we will be bringing many of our Cluster capabilities to OSF/1. Our goal is to have Digital's UNIX clustering capabilities continue to exceed the UNIX clustering capabilities available from any competitive offering. And to extend our ability to provide choice and flexibility to our customers even further, we will also eventually be bringing Digital Cluster capabilities to WindowsNT! Digital has made Clusters "transparent" to Open applications on OpenVMS, it is reasonable to expect that unlike most of our competition, we will provide that same degree of freedom on DEC OSF/1 and WindowsNT. It also means that it is reasonable to expect that our DEC OSF/1 Cluster functionality will rapidly continue to leap over the cluster functionality of ALL competitive UNIX offerings. The THOUSANDS of satisfied OpenVMS Cluster customers that exist today are testimony to Digital EXPERIENCE and CAPABILITIES, and we THANK YOU!!!! And just as DEC OSF/1 will gain some of the OpenVMS Cluster capabilities that exist on OpenVMS today, cluster functionality on OpenVMS will be significantly enhanced and stay on the leading edge of "cluster" capabilities by gaining new functions, as described earlier. Finally, to many customers, "Open Client/Server Computing" means integrating the worlds of traditional servers (such as OpenVMS, UNIX, MVS, OS/400, etc.) with the world of PCs and PC LANS. The business issues that drive Open Client/Server computing are the issues of integrating data, applications and system resources without compromising manageability, security, integrity, and control. OpenVMS currently is the only major platform that IDC rates as having superior PC and MACINTOSH integration capabilities, while simultaneously having SNA integration capabilities rated as highly as those from IBM itself. Products like PATHWORKS, Data Base Integrator (DBI), and ACCESSWORKS differentiate Digital, and have allowed Digital OpenVMS customers to succeed in implementing Open Client/Server Computing at a level where our competition has often been unable to compete effectively. 4) I have VAX systems today. Do I have to migrate, and if so, how? There are multiple options for the existing OpenVMS VAX customer. Our message here needs to be very clear, and very powerful. There are 10 million OpenVMS users out there who we know are depending on us! In the last few years, and up until only recently, there had been some migration from Digital's VAX installed base to alternative offerings from the competition, most frequently either PC lans or competitive UNIX products. Many of these customers have been very specific about their primary reasons for change: - 1) VAX/VMS isn't "Open", and I'm convinced that I should rearchitect to "Open" (and more recently, Open Client/Server). - 2) The raw performance and price/performance of VAX is not competitive with alternative technologies in the market. Only recently has Digital CORRECTED these two VERY REAL AND ACCURATE customer concerns. As a result, our remaining installed base, at 10 million users strong, has stabilized. However, without our clear and immediate communication regarding how we will help you into the future, we understand our risks. We greatly appreciate your business in the past, and do not take "for granted" your business in the future, but understand that we must continue to earn it. Several recent (and public) external surveys of Digital's present VAX customer base indicated that given a choice, between 87% to 94% want to stay with OpenVMS, making them possibly the most loyal group of customers in the industry. We believe that THESE 87%-94% OF OUR CUSTOMERS WANT TO HEAR HOW WE WILL CONTINUE TO PROVIDE LEADERSHIP OPENVMS SOLUTIONS FOR THE FUTURE. Many key Digital customers have recently made it very clear that without compelling evidence to support a bright future for OpenVMS, that they will most likely change VENDORS, and not merely technology. Fortunately, we believe that our story and message is powerful, and hopefully compelling... First, this past October 12th, 1993, Digital introduced new VAX products which in their respective classes made them superior to ALL competitive offerings, (even the best RISC technology that IBM, HP, and SUN can offer), for commercial price/performance. These VAX systems run over 10,000 third party applications TODAY. More importantly, on October 12th, Digital made a public commitment to future generations of VAX systems, which will continue to scale from workstations to data-center class high end servers and clusters. Thus, customers can continue to invest in VAX with confidence that what has already proven to be the longest run in binary compatibility and investment protection in the HISTORY OF THE COMPUTER INDUSTRY will continue. Digital is now announcing, as promised, several new VAX systems that represent leadership commercial price/performance in their respective classes, including the MicroVAX 3100 model 85, the VAX 4000 model 505, the VAX 4000 model 705, and the VAX 7000 model 700. Second, and more importantly, with Alpha AXP Digital provides the VAX customer with the possibility to make the leap into the future of computing with the BEST INVESTMENT PROTECTION (while transcending computer architectures) in THE HISTORY OF THE COMPUTER INDUSTRY. Digital's engineers have outdone themselves (and every other competitive vendor) by bringing THE SAME OpenVMS that runs on VAX over to the industry leading hot new RISC technology of Alpha AXP with version 6.1. The same system management, the same user interfaces, the same software development tools, and so on. Even though software on Alpha AXP is running against a new instruction set (radically different from VAX), and on a totally new hardware architecture (radically different from VAX), to the user, the programmer, and the system manager, IT LOOKS THE SAME. Digital has done the hard work for migration, so that our customers do not have to! This MUST be contrasted with what customers of our competition have had to go through in the past, and might go through in the future: Digital: VAX introduced in 1977. Still binary compatible in 1994, with public commitment to future generations. VAX/VMS was proprietary and closed (and proud of it!), now as OpenVMS incrementally supports all major Open technologies and Open Systems pricing, with investment protection. Alpha AXP introduced in 1992, able to run OpenVMS with a subset of functionality as implemented on VAX. In May 1994, OpenVMS on VAX and Alpha AXP achieve functional parity with version 6.1, with public commitment to major future functional enhancements. Applications that are up to 16 years old are binary executable on current and future VAX systems, and can usually recompile and run on new state-of-the-art Alpha AXP platforms without source code edits. Primary Competitive Products and Status during same period of time: IBM: - Series/1? - System 8100? - System/3? - System/34? - System/36? - System/38? - AS/400: Recent IBM announcement of migration to future 64-bit architecture. Compatibility?... - RS/6000: Future migration to new 64-bit architecture, PowerPC based? Compatibility? - PS/2: Future migration to PowerPC? Compatibility? - System/370 and System/390 H/W -System 370? 434X/433X? 303X? 436X/438X? 308X? 9370? 309X? ES/9000? System/390 architecture ES/9000? Future? - System/370 and System/390 S/W - DOS/VS? DOS/VSE? VSE/SP? VSE/ESA? - VM/CMS? VM/SP? VM/XA? VM/ESA? - OS/VS1? OS/VS2? MVS/SP? MVS/XA? MVS/ESA? HP: - HP 1000? - HP 3000? - MPE? - HP PA-RISC (HP-UX and MPE/ix): Public announcement of future migration to 64-bit VLIW "Post-RISC"? Compatibility?? When???????? SUN: - SPARC with SUN O/S? - SOLARIS (32-bit)? - Future SuperSPARC 64-bit architecture???? - Compatibility????? Digital products have made the jump to 64 bit technology already, and are available NOW. All major competitive offerings will require FUTURE migrations, with unqualified incompatibility, to 64-bit technology. In addition to protecting our customer's investments in people, training, and software, Alpha AXP offers historically unmatched investment protection across computer architectures for our VAX customers for peripherals (disk, tape), communications infrastructure (Ethernet, FDDI), and in the case of the VAX 7000, even the platform itself. For all other platforms, the new Advantage Upgrade program and Alpha-Ready program provide excellent upgrade options. And as for the 6%-13% of the VAX installed base that have stated their wish to move to a different operating system in the future: Digital offers the best UNIX option, with many popular OpenVMS software products now coming to DEC OSF/1, such as Rdb. By design, Digital language compilers have achieved unprecedented parity in their Alpha AXP versions for both DEC OSF/1 and OpenVMS. Any customer that chooses to move from OpenVMS to UNIX will find that their easiest, fastest, and least risk path will be with DEC OSF/1. Digital offers the best WindowsNT option, with scalable platforms, Microsoft-approved service and support, and the most experience with WindowsNT from any full-service vendor. Digital offers outstanding PC and PC LAN products, with the only "RISC-ready" PC available. Summary Digital's OpenVMS products and technology today are the most competitive that they have ever been in their history. Those products, coupled with Digital services, and Digital partners can provide for very effective business solutions. Digital is committed to continued support for OpenVMS, and to industry leading functional enhancements for OpenVMS. OpenVMS today supports all major Open Standards to build or run Open applications, and to interoperate with other open systems. Industry analysts, such as Gartner Group, Aberdeen Group, and IDC have rated OpenVMS as the premier computing environment available for Business Critical/Mission Critical computing. OpenVMS systems currently hold the world records for most multi-vendor data processing application benchmarks for both performance and price/performance, while offering the absolute, undisputed widest range of binary-compatible scalable computers in the history of the computer industry. OpenVMS uniquely offers what we like to call "No Compromise Computing". Have your cake, and eat it too. Thank You, Ken