VP Sales & Marketing
Computing Solutions Limited
E-mail: RobinFoley@csllink.com
I would like to utilize one my introductory greetings to get this session under way. However, since one great sage did observe that the USA and Great Britain are two great nations separated by a single language, I will bow to my more recognized and truly international greetings. I should, perhaps, identify the great Irish playwright – George Bernard Shaw – as the man to so early identify this language idiosyncrasy back in the 1920’s.
This international greeting has evolved over a considerable period of time where Computing Solutions Limited Known more typically just as CSL have spent much time working with Hewlett-Packard HP3000 organizations all over the world expanding the message of HP3000 Interoperability.
CSL was founded in 1977, and in the process acquired the very first HP3000 to be installed in the United Kingdom. Purchased on the back of what has been described to me as excellent salesmanship, the 3000 had a predefined purpose. The fledgling CSL was to be a computer bureau and plans were already in place to start development of manufacturing, financial and commercial systems, which would be the mainstay of the companies business for the next 20 years. The people who do all the work today own the stock in the organization. Some of those stockholders have been with the company since its inception. In its time CSL has been HP’s largest single system site in the UK and the bureau business (now, of course, a full-blooded Facilities Management Operation) still provides a stable income to support other interests. That FM business today runs the UK Used car warranty systems for many major manufacturers such as Ford and General Motors.
My name as you can see is Robin Foley. I regularly advise my audiences that although I do work for and English company I am not English. I am Irish. Although I now carry the job title of Vice President Sales & Marketing, my background is very much in the financial arena, where I held major Financial controllerships for two major American IT organizations in the 70’s and 80’s. Self development pre-empted my move to sales where I did all the usual sales things for a number of years before moving on to sales management with one of the UK’s largest software houses and ultimately to CSL nearly 5 years ago.
CSL, as I explained, has been first and foremost a customer of Hewlett-Packard – remaining true to the HP3000 through thick and thin! In later years CSL has developed a very healthy relationship and partnership with HP as a result of some simple (and I use the term very advisedly) in-house software development. Some 5 years ago almost CSL wanted to provide a basic client/server facility to its bureau customers and recognized ODBC as the technology necessary to facilitate this requirement and approached HP to utilize their offering. This as you all know was mere wishful thinking on our part and as a result our own development team quoted us two weeks to deliver one for internal use. To cut a long story short, we developed a driver and HP UK suggested we take it to the rest of the UK HP3000 market. That in turn led to our working closely with HP Marketing in Boeblingen, Germany and ultimately with CSY in Cupertino.
Today, we consider ourselves to be a very key HP3000 Partner.
Interoperability is very much an in-word at present. It covers a number of areas that have not changed despite the fashion and terminology of the times: client/server, accessibility, and GUI front-ends, whatever the IT gurus wanted us to adopt as the hot topic of the day. In general it meant making two systems communicate. Networking gave us like to like communication and heaven was the concept of PC to proprietary – whether that proprietary is the like of mainframe, mini – as we then called them – or dare I say UNIX.
ODBC has been around for a long time. In most environments it just exists. It is used and no questions were asked. But in the early days the connectivity tools were proprietary and this defeated the entire concept of open systems. And so a new standard was born – Open DataBase Connectivity – ultimately developed by Microsoft to be effectively a tool to allow a PC application to get data from and to a database with standard code. The standard was accepted by the industry – after all who was arguing – and most systems adopted ODBC as standard. Regrettably from our standpoint among the very few that didn’t was our beloved HP3000.
So a system designed by Hewlett-Packard to be Open was just a little light in the very areas where it was trying to advance – true open standards and portability, since a) software development on the platform was decreasing alarmingly and b) the tools did not exist for true interoperability.
Yet despite what users might have viewed as a discouraging environment for the HP3000 HP did come out with a database that would advance the cause of interoperability in the 3000 immeasurably. That database was Image/SQL. Image/SQL gives us all two benefits that do not exist in any other interoperable environment. Firstly it gives us all the intrinsics of standard TurboImage – which means that the applications which have served us all so well, and which continue to serve us, can operate with all the speed and efficiency to which we have become accustomed. And, secondly, it gave us the all important facility of SQL – Structured Query Language – the language of interoperability which allows us the ability to have relational capability on the database without the total overhead usually associated with relational databases.
It is important to know that this SQL capability has been available since Version 4 of MPE and is shipped as standard by HP – you can not order TurboImage from HP now so any overhead, real or simply perceived, already exists on all your systems.
So we can all agree – ODBC provides simple, automatic PC Application access to and from the HP3000. We at CSL developed an ODBC Driver for the HP3000. We followed all the standards to create an effective tool for interoperability, very much along the lines subsequently done by HP themselves, patted ourselves on the head for our ingenuity and development prowess and expected that our product, which we named in those early days FREEDOM, would be used by HP3000 users the world over.
But we hadn’t reckoned with you – the users. Yes, FREEDOM – ODBC – did work, but…
It did not have the sort of security that we HP3000 have come to expect from our systems. Sure we had to set up regular MPE log-ons in order to create a user connection to the HP but many systems managers did not want ANY opportunity for users to update the database. They did not want parameterized read or update capability; they wanted read only implementations by user.
But so many IT functions began to see the potential for Client/Server development – however simple that project might be – and as a result require a Write capability for an individual application. Standard ODBC rules will allow you to create either a Read only or a Read/Write capability but not both simultaneously. HP3000 users wanted to, needed to have this facility in order to maintain the security integrity of their systems. As a result the requirement for an HP3000 user was to have a Client-aware read or update facility available.
Being HP3000 users, IT managers went one step further to protect their systems. Should they develop a Client Application, and this could represent either a brand new application or simply client-side renewal, the HP3000 management wanted update capability restricted to the designated application and not to the client tool – VB, Delphi or whatever. Since security of corporate data is so often an absolute in IT management terms this was not a nice to have facility – it was a mandatory requirement.
Just when you thought it was safe to believe that ODBC had been made safe to pass on to the great hordes of users clamoring for access to data another similar issue was raised. Sure it was great to have a differential between Update applications and Read Only applications but…since all users were not equal you demanded yet another variation on security. Some of the users out there could be trusted. Well, OK, that is a gross overstatement. Some of the users out there had to be trusted with the ability to update the central Image databases from their own Access databases or Excel spreadsheets or whatever. These applications provide excellent facilities for undertaking database reconciliation, for maintaining file formats such as names and addresses and managed correctly were a useful tool in the general business of managing data.
To manage that requirement you ODBC author has once more got to go beyond the standard terms of reference for ODBC interconnectivity. HP3000 managers demanded and got the facility to determine which individual users got to get update facilities from individual Client Applications and which users got only read only.
And, as if to prove that knee bones are connected to thighbones, that created another little conundrum. Some of the users were running both 16-bit and 32-bit client applications concurrently and needed access to ODBC drivers that could manage both environments – concurrently. As so often happens in the HP3000 world, what the HP3000 IT manager wants, the HP3000 manager gets!
At least this level of security allowed us to determine which applications were update enabled and which were read only. Now if you are following the direction this seemingly unending demand for security is going you will probably see what is coming next. What are the THREE normal levels of access security? Update, Read Only AND No Access. So, no sooner had the three security access modes been made available by application and by user, than yet one more variation came into view.
We know that IT management likes to keep tight control on PC licensing. The issue may not be as much to fore as in years gone by but it still exists. Two requirements for what I term ‘inverse security’ emerged. Both can be described as ‘I want Open systems access to my systems but I don’t want any access allowed.’ Why?
Firstly, where IT desktop strategies are in place it is more than likely that, for example, an IT manager will wish to encourage his users to utilize his corporate standard at the expense of others. He may wish to exclude, say, Lotus products in favor of Microsoft products.
Secondly, there are environments where only overtly authorized product access makes sense. Government installations and particularly those involved in Defense establishments may only wish pre-determined applications to have access to data. At times there seems almost no end to the potential for a secure environment.
CSL exhibited its ODBC product – LINKWAY – at HP World in Chicago last year. Without any doubt, security was the single most important issue that we discussed at our booth. And despite the fact that we had covered most or all of the angles I’ve already mentioned there was one more. Lets review ODBC again. ODBC allows a PC compliant application to get data to and from a database with standard code. To and from a database – that is the key – not to an application. And many of you out there use third party security products, for example, Security 3000, and you need access to the database to be controlled additionally by that security product.
The point I must make is that all of these security requirements have surfaced not out of any need for Middleware vendors to create unique selling features for their products but out of a need for HP3000 to maintain the secure environments they had already established on their systems.
Just as you think the security issue can be safely discarded as being ‘under control’ let me just identify a major practical issue. If you allow a user access to data, what is the first thing he or she is likely to do? Yep! You got it. They’ll say ‘Great, I’ll have it all…now!’
This is known amongst IT professional on all six continents as ‘The Query from Hell!’
Two things ought to be achievable to resolve this Systems management nightmare. If most applications that run amok can be stopped simply by hitting the escape button, why not also your ODBC inquiry? A manageable way to control traffic is to implement a facility to review whether the response from the server is really what is required. Sample queries – the ability to review 50 or 100 or 1000 rows of data should be a prerequisite requirement for your ODBC tool.
That is security, the issue that singly taxed most minds when CSL introduced its product to the US market last year.
Having locked our data up as tight as a drum then what?
Your ODBC Driver should be user friendly. Which user? The systems managers or the end-user? Why, both of course!
Lets start with end-users, who after all believe totally that they know more about IT than IT professionals. And they won’t be dissuaded. And, lets be fair its too hard trying to convince them that computing goes beyond a fundamental ability to point and click! They remain convinced that huge organizations could be managed in their entirety on a single spreadsheet incorporating a few macros. This totally preposterous argument forms the basis of the close bond between IT and users.
To start with they have no understanding of data structures (look at the total mess they get their PCs into) and the likelihood is that the item names presented by an Image database could be written in Martian for all they know. Except for NASA users this is useless. I always quote one simple example to illustrate this for our own users.
A major HP3000 software house, still heavily committed to the HP3000, developed financial software using an Image database. Post release of the applications their users requested an additional facility. Both the AR and AP applications did not have a facility for identifying the Due Date for payment of invoices. Incorporated into the next release of the software the application duly displayed on the screen a Due date for Payment. However the programmer, never once believing that a USER! Would need access to the database field for Due Date for Payment included the information in a free and available field in the database (put aside for precisely this type of eventuality) called…QUANTITY 2.
Even with a compass and divining rod the user was never going to find the database item!
The message is you will need a data dictionary to help users navigate their way through the data.
Users, being users will also want a few other frills that they perceive as standard magic on their PCs. Not for them an understanding that Image databases do not, typically, store decimal points within the database. And if a decimal point is required – to what precision? 2 for sales values? 4 for cost values? 3 for volume? Or is it 0 on some product lines? And what happens when you want to undertake percentage calculations? You need a dictionary facility!
And dates! Julian dates, system dates, dates from a date, yy/mm/dd, mm/dd/yy and every other combination are likely to exist on your HP3000. Obviously, you will need some form of date/data normalization to help your poor, unfortunate, but highly knowledgeable, user use his standard PC date formats to access your database.
Another issue, which really relates to changing field names, applies to language translation. This is often key to multi-national corporations who need to translate their ‘English’ item names to French or Spanish or German or whatever. What you must realize is that in a lot of countries, knowledge of English is at best limited. In many, the language has no relationship with English, which means that guessing doesn’t even, work!
More concerning is the fact that hosts of languages use entirely different character sets which create major problems of interoperability. A simple example is French where, for example, there are three variations of the letter A and three variations on the letter E, which, if not recognized by the HP, can invalidate queries (which is the most positive solution) but more usually provides the wrong result to a perfectly valid query. And that could be devastating!
Other, more subtle, user friendly facilities should also be in place.
Easy and transparent access to approved databases.
Access to stored procedures that already exist on the HP3000.
Server centric processing. Many PC Client applications have sufficient intelligence to analyze the capabilities of the ODBC Driver they are using to access the database. In simple terms, the more compliant, or advanced, or functional, or specialized the Driver is the more the PC Client application will use the server process to do the work. In this world of Meaningless Indicators of processor speed (MIPS to you), I have a very simple measure.
‘The speed of a computer system is inversely proportioned to the volume of coffee that you consume’. Put simply, if you had the simple choice of sorting one million records on an HP3000 or a PC where would you do it? Remember, one of those old, tired, but nevertheless still valid definitions of Client/Server. Processing should always be done at the system best suited to the purpose. Would you not prefer your implementation to make the right decision for you? Bear in mind that you can not determine that selection yourself.
Multi-threading is another major issue. Will your user require simultaneous transfer from multiple databases to a single PC App? Will he or she require simultaneous transfer to multiple applications? I’m sorry, but yes they will. They may not know it. But they will try to do it even if they simply believe they are putting a process into ‘background’.
Your ODBC Driver should of course have been fully tested with the PC Application that you want to use. This is only a sample list of some of the more common applications. Today, we should perhaps add Crystal Reports, Cold Fusion or Microsoft Internet Information Server.
What you should be very clear on is whether or not your Driver will work with MS-Office 97 and MS-98. I mention these specifically because as in all true ‘Open-Systems environments’ the rules change when Mr Gates so decrees. So it was at the release of Office 97. All bets are off, we have a new set of rules!
So should you believe that having satisfied your own internal concerns on security and enabled users to have easier and more friendly access to the data that your problems are solved – think again.
A strange and necessary function of ODBC access to your corporate data is that it gives instant access to up-to-the-minute live information. That immediacy of information is where the most advantage is gained. As a result, some, maybe only one, maybe just a few more, will want access to that data from anywhere. Where is anywhere? It could be from home, a hotel room at a seminar or exhibition, from the offices of a key supplier or customer. Put simply, if your CEO is, for want of a better word, stranded, at the local Holiday Inn in London or Tokyo, can he get at the information he needs to conclude that critical corporate deal?
OK, I see the look in your eyes! Your CEO couldn’t find his way around an Image database with a white stick and a guide dog! But you can, and you can give him a simple point and click solution that gives him the 5 or 10 most critical business indicators that he requires. The tools are of your choosing. What you can’t deny is that the technology not only exists but works – time after time after time. And for what its worth, you get the credit for this major technological advance, and all you are doing is using your system of highest knowledge - the HP3000.
But what you have just delivered to your entire user base, from highest CEO to …well, to all your users is really a well-managed Datawarehouse!
Now before I get any well intentioned alternative definition of a Datawarehouse let me qualify my statement. You have supplied ‘access’ to a well of information contained on your corporate or enterprise system. This might be the start of a long-term IT strategy that we can make HP3000 centric. Now you may be able to integrate more users to your enterprise data, eliminate all data duplication and rationalize your desktop strategy. You could implement the first step toward e-commerce by having a data repository on the one hand and a true production system on the other via the implementation of Mirror/iX or Shareplex.
That capability through disk shadowing can lead to the creation of a high availability environment – because remember that e-commerce will ultimately lead to the globalization of business and the need for 24-hour by 7-days per week usage.
Consideration of, and development of this kind of strategy, provides a lot for your users. Power to use live data does provide the end-user with timely and effective decision making capabilities – as requested by that same end-user for some considerable time. Full 24-hour accessibility is, by definition more responsive. The whole concept of user or client enabling is enhanced which provides control of business decisions and strategies at the point where it is most useful – right where the decisions are made!
And there are two other key points to be made here. Users understand, or claim to understand, their PC environments. With true interoperability we give them transparent use of a very powerful tool – SQL! Without even knowing it, users can generate very complex queries on the HP3000, and execute all of these complex commands directly on the HP3000, thereby using the power of their Image databases to undertake sorts and calculations, etc.
What does all this buy for you from a ‘Corporate Strategic Standpoint’? User satisfaction! At the very least it is perceived user satisfaction - the fulfillment of longstanding demands from the user base. This is created through integration with Desktop Tools. We all know that users have long believed that usage of these whizzo desktop tools would revolutionize their working practices. All they need do now is justify their use at a departmental level, or if they wish to have central control, within the defined business tool/IT strategy defined inside your expanded IT budgets.
This is the answer to those boardroom calls for open systems. MPE and Windows and/or NT working together seamlessly. Precisely the view that is held at management level and using the same POSIX capabilities that are used in other interoperable environments.
But hold on just a moment. We mentioned integration to desktop tools but so far we have only undertaken a one-eyed view. Sure we can get information out of our Image databases but can we work the other way round – getting information into Image databases?
The answer is YES. Any compliant (and ODBC compliant is the watchword here) tool can allow you the facility to write to your database. The good news is that, at a conservative guess, at least 95% of Windows products are ODBC compliant. So the question that arises here, and I can see that the concept of letting mere users loose on your databases with write capabilities is scary, why or how would you do it?
One possibility is Front-end Application Development. Trips very nicely off the tongue, but what does it mean? Two things really. You might have a new application that you wish to develop and integrate to your existing HP3000 applications. I know of one HP3000 customer, part of the Fortune 500, who has created a new quotation system that can utilize existing Bills of Materials to price quotes, autofax his client and has the facility to post an accepted quotation, i.e. a new order, directly to his manufacturing application on the HP3000, which in turn creates works orders, dispatch notes and invoices, updates the financial applications and provides all the integrated management information the corporation requires. This new application, which was created to shorten the quotation cycle (and also to save unnecessary storage of BoMs on the HP) has increased business revenues by approximately 20% and profit by even more!
But it can be simpler than that. One of the major criticisms of HP3000 applications – well to be honest, the traditional HP3000 applications – is that they look and feel old. There is an acceptance that the application itself is fine, just the look and feel that causes problems. So, no problem: just re-engineer the input screens and eliminate the V-Plus screen. By using ODBC to write to your application you will no longer need terminal emulation to provide your interface from the desktop to the HP3000.
In turn this will reduce your user count. In theory, all ODBC users can connect to your HP3000 without generating a session, which means that they are not being counted against your user license. This in turn reduces your support costs, and here we are talking real bottom-line dollars!
This improves the individual contribution. This is a trick slide! Reducing costs improves profitability and therefore increases the financial contribution or profitability per member of staff. However, experience has shown that the individual enthusiasm and effort of the employee is also improved because of the effect on morale of new systems.
An extension of this theme takes us into the most discussed topic of interoperability on the planet! Internet, or Intranet (the internal Internet). There is also Extranet (a closed Internet between different organizations) and the much hyped – sorry, discussed – E-commerce, which is a nice term for electronic transaction processing.
I am not trying to set definitions for Internet usage. I want to investigate what this technology can deliver to the HP3000 and for the purpose of this paper I am going to call the whole Internet, Intra and Extranet and E-commerce environment ‘The Internet’.
What does the Internet offer that is considered so attractive?
The Internet does provide a very well recognized user-friendly interface to interoperable technology. I say that on the most simplistic level of user perception. It is easy to develop applications (because these developments are in basic PC environments) and everyone has a simple Internet interface – the various browsers that currently exist! We have the term ‘Universal Client’ which typically refers to Netscape and Internet explorer.
Whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, the Internet is an accepted technology. Management knows of its existence, if only because of the advertising or marketing hype that goes with it. We have an advertisement that runs in the UK (and from some discussions with US clients also runs here) where one corporate executive says to another: "It says here we need to be on the Internet." His colleague, after some deliberation, says: "Why?"
Reviewing the promotional material again, the first guy simply replies: "It doesn’t say!" That is the power of marketing and while I don’t want to disagree with that perception it is true to say that Internet technology is an accepted route to future systems or IT strategic deployment. One of the absolute beauties of Internet connectivity is its visibility – the first installed element tends to be E-mail – and without trying to put a value on E-mail – that is viewed as being a significant advance on traditional systems.
The perennial question that faces the HP3000 IT Manager is whether or not to include the HP3000 in his IT Internet strategy. The HP3000 is, after all, capable of full integration to the Internet, so much so that Freeware is available from Hewlett-Packard to provide the interconnectivity. The downside is the front-ends that are currently available on the HP3000 and whether or not you would want new users, either internal or external to be faced with the traditional green on black formats that have served the HP3000 community for so long.
There are, though, some drawbacks. Just to get one client (i.e. one PC user) talking directly (and by directly I mean absolute one to one) to your HP3000 requires you to expose your corporate or enterprise system to ALL users. Our experience shows that you do not want to do this. The conundrum is quite simple. You want corporate visibility on the wwww – wonderful World Wide Web – but you do not want you business critical information on the web. It is the same old story – static information is safe, dynamic information is dangerous.
JAVA is the current hot potato in Internet technology. Many, many Java applets already exist and opening your HP3000 to virtual computing techniques will present any number of challenges. It is by definition a pervasive operating environment. And pervasive and HP3000 do not go together very well.
Strangely, and despite the questions that I have raised, the answer is yes. Do include your HP3000 in your long-term IT/Internet strategy but be mindful of the effects of providing dynamic or mission critical data to users. Your HP3000 and Image database actually provides you with the fastest database server in the industry and you want to protect your investment in data. A good alternative is to create what is known as a Server/Client: a web application server that can act as a secure client to your Image database.
This gives you a number of potential options in terms of connectivity. If you already have a secure interoperable solution you can use that. What has gone before should have demonstrated that ODBC is such a secure solution. Since most web application servers are NT based then it logically follows that NT and ODBC will form the optimum solution. If you choose JAVA as your Server/Client then you may just as easily look at JDBC as your connectivity tool. Of course, it is only subjective speculation as to whether JAVA succeeds in the global market over the next10 years.
What has really happened in our market over the past months? Typically, we have experienced a lot of interest in Java. In practice, however, those corporates who are seeking to deploy applications over the Internet want to stay within the ‘deployed solutions environment’. What do I mean? Keep it clean! Keep it Microsoft!
What do you need to deliver true interoperability to your users? All of this, in blue, is already supplied to you by HP. This, in red, comes courtesy of Mr gates and Windows technology. The bit you are missing is ODBC and that is a very simple, plug and play utility.
In summary, getting interoperability is not the most difficult technical issue that you face. Getting manageable interoperability is a different matter entirely. Here, in order to succeed you need security to ensure that corporate, or enterprise, systems are protected to the levels you need.
You need user-friendliness, to ensure that you can realistically provide interoperability that end users can use.
You need openness, because with movement towards, or compliance with, the theory and concepts of open systems you will have difficulty in convincing the management at board level of the validity of the strategy.
And you will need speed – a relative measure but one that needs addressing if after everything you do you want the technological strategy to be really accepted.