Brett Cameron

Back in April 2022, I was on a call with a customer that I have had the pleasure of working with for many years. We were talking about a variety of topics, and one of the things they mentioned during the course of conversation was that as a consequence of the HP OpenView Smart Plug-In (SPI) for OpenVMS (VMSSPI) no longer being supported, they were establishing a project to design and build a replacement solution for monitoring their OpenVMS systems that would integrate with Dynatrace, which they had recently adopted as their new enterprise-wide incident management and monitoring solution. I have talked previously about the unfortunate decline in the number of ISV solutions available for OpenVMS, but in this case the situation was perhaps somewhat different, with the customer looking not only to replace the VMSSPI OpenView agent but OpenView as a whole across their entire business, encompassing multiple operating systems, using an arguably more modern monitoring solution.

In my previous post (https://vmssoftware.com/resources/blog/2024-09-30-application-services/) I talked about the unfortunate incremental decline in the number of ISV solutions available for OpenVMS and what can be done about this situation, with my general thesis being that with a little ingenuity and imagination it is invariably possible to devise excellent alternative solutions, often by leveraging open-source products and open standards, such that the resultant replacement solution if done properly may be in some ways superior (and arguably more cost-effective) than its no-longer supported and proprietary counterpart. In this post I will aim to continue with this general theme of "creative modernisation", based around a talk I gave at the recent Bootcamp event in Boston in which I demonstrated the ACMS product working on VSI OpenVMS x86-64, but before launching into the details of what I presented in this session I should just mention how great it was to catch up with old friends at Bootcamp and to see not only many familiar faces but also a good number of new ones. The event was without question a success, and what struck me most was the level of enthusiasm displayed by all those in attendance, which was absolutely great to see.

"There are many OpenVMS customers running large, complex, business-critical custom-written software applications. While these applications continue to serve the business well, many of them now need to interoperate and exchange data with external systems and applications running on other operating systems. The options available are to replace the existing OpenVMS-based system or to modernize it in some way so that it can continue to operate in a modern heterogeneous computing environment."

Following on from the recent webinar in which we briefly introduced VSI Application Services, I thought it might be worth providing a little more information by way of a short blog post. Looking at it very simply, VSI Application Services are a set of services designed to help you get the most out of your OpenVMS application environments, and while the primary aim is to provide services to help you move your OpenVMS applications to VSI OpenVMS x86-64, the overall scope of the services portfolio is much more general than that, ranging from workshops and small consulting engagements to investigate and advise on various modernisation options, through to assistance with major modernisation initiatives (such as porting to x86-64), and application maintenance and support, where we take over the task of looking after your application code. In short, if it’s anything to do with maintaining and enhancing your OpenVMS application environment, we are here to help, and we’d love to hear from you!