Article 550 of comp.databases.pick: Path: cs.utk.edu!gatech!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!shviid From: shviid@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Steen H Hviid) Newsgroups: comp.sys.prime,comp.databases.pick Subject: Prime Migration Survey Date: 6 Mar 1994 18:56:16 GMT Organization: The Ohio State University Lines: 263 Message-ID: <2ld90g$45s@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: bottom.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu Xref: cs.utk.edu comp.sys.prime:3994 comp.databases.pick:550 The Internet Survey of Prime Migrations --------------------------------------- This is the result of the survey I sent out two weeks ago. Thanks to all who have responded. I have received responses covering 40 sites, from six countries. The most represented country was the United States, with 26 sites. Next came Australia with eight sites, followed by three sites in Great Britain, Norway, Sweden and South Africa are represented with one site each. Some of you answered for more than one site, in one case two people from the same company responded (I used a composite of their information). The responding shops are mainly small with one or two machines. The small-shop machine is a 4050 or a 9955. Four larger shops (five or more machines) responded, two of them universities. Four sites also mentioned they had Prime/EXL/MIPS Unix machines. This table shows the size of the responding sites. For simplicity, the size of the machines is ignored. Sites Machines at site 17 One machine 13 Two machines 3 Three machines 1 Four machines 1 Five machines 1 Eight machines 1 15 machines 1 27 machines 1 70 machines Question: "What type of environment is (was) on your 50-series?" 33% (13) Mainly Prime Information, but also Primos programs 25% (10) Exclusively Prime Information programs 20% (8) Mainly a purchased application 23% (9) Mainly own Primos programs 8% (3) Mainly MEDUSA or other CAD/CAM package 8% (3) System Builder 5% (2) Mainly other portable database language 2% (1) Arc/Info 2% (1) Primix The percentages are calculated against the forty responding sites. A few sites checked off more than one box so the percentages add up to more than 100. Prime Information sites dominate, with little more than half of the respondents citing that as their main environment. Question: "If you have a substantial amount of Primos programs, what programming language is mainly used?" 56% (14) Fortran 32% (8) Cobol 24% (6) C 8% (2) Pascal 8% (2) SPL 8% (2) PLP 8% (2) CPL 4% (1) Basic 4% (1) PL/1 4% (1) RPG Twenty-five sites reported using one or more programming language for Primos programs. Fortran is the dominating language, I don't know how that is divided between the old free Fortran IV compiler and Fortran 77. Question: "What stage of conversion are you currently at? (Choose one). If you have multiple computer systems, please specify the 'average' stage of your convertion." 3% (1) No intention to migrate to another platform 8% (3) Evaluating, no plans yet 18% (7) Planning to move within next two years 3% (1) Planning to move within a year 15% (6) Planning to move within next six months 35% (14) Currently working on converting to another platform 20% (8) Have completed the conversion These figures must be interesting for Computer Vision, no wonder they are farming out their spare parts, Primos maintenance. In about two years there will hardly be anybody left! The lone site which intends to keep their system, is a software vendor who uses it to maintain the Primos version of their product. Of the five large-site respondents, the four of them specified they were planning to move within the next two years. The remaining one was currently working on it. The largest of all respondents, with about 70 machines distributed over several buildings, told me they were two managers, ten technical staff members, and four support staffs. No wonder they first expect to make the conversion in two years. A few sites mention they intend to keep a machine around for quite awhile, as backup system or in case they need to revive old data or programs. The survey among the members of NWPUG (North West Prime Users Group) in August of 1993 revealed that two sites (7%) had no plans to convert, while five (17%) had already completed their conversion. Question: "Which systems do you intend to migrate to, or consider the most likely platform to migrate to. If you intend to use a multitude of platforms, please specify all." 30% (15) Sun 20% (10) Network of PC's 18% (9) Data General Aviion 18% (9) Hewlett-Packard 9000 series 14% (7) Digital VAX / Ultrix 14% (7) IBM RS/6000 8% (4) Network of workstations 4% (2) SUN Solaris 4% (2) Digital VAX / VMS 4% (2) Sequent 4% (2) NCR 3000 series 18% (9) Other platforms (platforms with one vote only) The numbers show which platform has been selected by a site. Some sites expect to use more than one platform, again making the sum of the percentages more than 100. Several sites combine a network of PC's with a central server system. Some sites choose different platforms dictated by the purchased application they use. The Sun systems seem particularly popular in Australia. Of the eight sites Down Under, five of them specify Sun's equipment. I tried to split up the platform choices for PI and non-PI sites. The dataset is rather thin, but it seems that Sun is the winner for non-PI sites, while Data General has a slight lead for PI sites. Responses specifying they are only evaluating manufacturers are not included in the table (the responses here were usually 4-5 types). These figures also include data from the NWPUG survey, for those sites who then reported their conversion being "In Progress" or "Completed." Randy Styka from Computronics, has the following comments, brought with his permission: In the Sun world we treat it as two OS's, SunOS4 and Solaris2, since they are quite different. We based the above system purchases on our customer's input. A survey of 80ish Prime users around 18 months ago saw the majority moving to AIX and HP (roughly tied for first place), Sun was a close third. We had a few customers moving to MIPS (Prime EXL/7000 series, also). We did not see DG as a player 18 months ago, but we started to get a lot of requests for products on DG 10 months ago. We bought our DG AViiON system last autumn and have seen this as a popular platform for Prime users. For comparison, the following table is taken from International Spectrum magazine (January/February issue). The data is published by the Aberdeen Group. 1992 Worldwide Commercial Multiuser RISC/Unix Market: 46.5% Hewlett-Packard 16.0% IBM 9.2% Sun 5.8% Data General 7.0% ICL 3.9% Pyramid 3.9% Siemens 7.8% Other The figure does not specify whether that is in terms of seats, boxes or revenue. Question: "If you use Prime Information, which environment do you intend to migrate to?" 60% (18) PI/open (PI+) 13% (4) UniData 10% (3) Universe 10% (3) Oracle 3% (1) Sybase 3% (1) FoxPro PI/open is clearly the winner here. This is hardly a surprise for those of us who attended NPUG last summer, several speakers recommended PI/open as the easiest conversion, as long as there was no need for the extra features available in Unidata. One respondent mentioned they would rather prefer PI/open but were forced to convert to Unidata by their software vendor. It seems like Oracle has a high following in Australia. Of the seven Prime Information shops there, two report they are converting to Oracle. An additional three sites report they are converting to PI/open, but will eventually convert to Oracle. These three sites are from the same system of universities, though different campuses. One site which does not use PI, did mention they were converting to Informix. Randy Styka (Computronics) comments: We don't use PI but we see a *lot* of PI customers in our list of customers. 18 months ago they were 80% Universe, 20% Unidata, but that has changed to roughly 50% PI/Open, 30% Universe, 20% Unidata. All these numbers are just guesses based on people we talk to, not scientifically provable! Question: "Do you intend to hire consultants to do the migration?" 75% (28) No 11% (4) Yes, doing most or all of the migration 14% (5) Yes, doing selected parts of the migration Obviously, we have a rather self sufficient crowd here! No surprise her,e since I would expect that people subscribing to the Internet newsgroups are interested in detailed technical issues. Some respondents mention that converting the Prime Information applications are generally the smallest part of the migration. Trouble spots are the spooler system and batch scheduling. Also, many sites take the opportunity to introduce networked terminals or PC's, which cause their own problems. I hope you have found the results of this little informal survey interesting. Steen Hansen Hviid Computer Specialist The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio, USA email: hansen+@osu.edu -------------------------------------------------------------- This survey was conducted using the Internet newsgroups comp.sys.prime and comp.databases.pick, and the info-prime Internet mailing list. The responses were gathered between February 19. and March 4, 1994. Thanks to all who responded. A special thanks to Randy Styka for his comments and to Dale Higgs who supplied data from the survey NWPUG (North West Prime Users Group) conducted in August 1993. This survey may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes, as long as the authors name and this copyright notice is kept intact. Data from this survey may be quoted in commercial publications if the author's name is mentioned as source. Copyright, 1994, Steen Hansen Hviid. March 6, 1994.