Sector7 clarifies: We're not a part of IBM

After our report on Sector7's involvement in the retirement of HP's Unix servers, we stand corrected, or least clarified. Even though one part of the company was sold to IBM to do this work, Sector7 remains an independent firm with the skills to do other kinds of migrations. Including some HP 3000s, according to the company's president Jon Power.

"Sector7 was never acquired by IBM," he said. "In addition to doing their migrations as their Migration Factory -- we did their server consolidation projects, which, are just hundreds of less-complex migrations. IBM acquired the server consolidation business, not the HP 3000 or OpenVMS migration business."

Power adds that IBM Global Services unit does try to do HP 3000 and OpenVMS migrations, "but they just aren't very good at them. They do subcontract some of the more complex ones to us. IBM acquired part of our large scale server consolidation business back in 2003. We still retain many HP 3000 experts."

The Sector7 executive mentioned former Interex chairman Denys Beauchemin as one of the 3000 experts the company's worked with, as well as a joint engagement with ScreenJet to migrate Ford Motor off its 3000s and systems written in Transact.

Power also said in reply to our article that 3000 migrations have slowed for the company since 2009. "In all honesty the 'free for all' HP 3000 migration spree slowed down about three years ago," he said. "OpenVMS migrations have always represented Sector7's major market, "and the number of OpenVMS to Linux requests have increased as geometrically as the HP 3000 business has decreased."

Migration houses like Sector7 are "viewed as the anti-christ" by the OpenVMS zealots, he added. But the vendors of these systems are the reason a migrator does its service. "We and others would not be in business if HP had not abandoned their users... Sure, we're here to make money from these migrations. What most zealots don't want to admit is that we are the last resort."

Powers' full comment on the original article -- which includes views on the lifespan of the 3000 as well as echoes from the Digital PDP world -- can be viewed underneath our article from April 3.