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+HPE Discontinues All Support and Sales of OpenVMS Products
+HPE officially ends all support and related services for the OpenVMS operating system. The question posed is, what does this mean for current organizations and end-users actively relying on OpenVMS? This document will serve as an update to the current state of OpenVMS and what options are available for OpenVMS customers who will need continued technical support.
+In 2013, Hewlett Packard Enterprises (otherwise known as HPE or formerly HP) announced the retirement date of OpenVMS. This date was specific to patching & development (otherwise known as engineering) related support and had no true bearing on general break/fix & troubleshooting support needs. Though customers at that time knew that by the end of 2020 there would be no more engineering support, they trusted that the more commonly needed break/fix & general troubleshooting support would be around for much longer than that date. As an example, HP discontinued Multi-Programming Executive, another operating system that HP didn't want to continue long term, in 2001, with engineering support running through 2010. In addition, when customers weren't successful in migrating off MPE, they asked HP to extend the date and HP complied multiple times with general break/fix and troubleshooting support presumably ending sometime later. Given this experience, many OpenVMS customers would have reasonably assumed that they would continue receiving, at a minimum, general telephone support until 2030 or so, but it recently became clear that this is not the case.
+In 2014, HP and VMS Software, Inc. (VSI) entered into an agreement in which VSI would be permitted to produce new versions of the OpenVMS operating system and customer support obligations would be based on the version of the operating system. If sold as an HP version, then the HP Customer Support Center handled the support, but if it was a VSI version of the operating system, then customer support could be handled by either HP or VSI, depending on which company sold the software and accompanying support to the customer. While this transitional process continues to unfold between the two organizations in order to propel OpenVMS forward, companies like PARSEC Group, a mission critical support services firm, former HP partner, and longtime player in the OpenVMS space, play a pivotal role in the continuation of OpenVMS by providing top-tier support for all versions along with training, consulting, managed services, and software development.
+At the end of 2016, HPE discontinued engineering support for Alphas and reduced customer support to "Reasonable Effort" instead of full support for Alphas.
+In 2018, HPE made huge changes to the OpenVMS space. It was announced that they were going to close down the OpenVMS Customer Support Center. Every member of that team had more than 20 years of experience with OpenVMS and they were released by the company. VSI was hired to takeover support as contractors to HPE customers, but decades of knowledge were lost in the transaction, including entire product set areas.
+Most importantly, and final note to make, HPE recently announced that they are no longer selling HPE OpenVMS licenses, and will discontinue sales of VSI versions of OpenVMS at the end of June 2019. Moving forward, VSI is now the only option for new licenses, but only for their releases and will only provide support to those releases. With that said, HPE OpenVMS customers can remain hopeful and easily obtain support through PARSEC Group who provides support, training & managed services for all versions of the O/S. For some, upgrading to VSI’s latest version is not a feasible option, but they can remain confident that they do still have options for obtaining the quality support they need.
+While HPE has removed most of the useful documentation, product download pages, the freeware site, dozens of forums, and ultimately caused most URLs found by search engines to now result in either a "not found" error or link to the single PDF that points to the small portion of useful documentation left, the resiliency of the OpenVMS community began providing a remedy to this with the creation of a new OpenVMS Technical Resource Document. Pertaining to the importance of this new technical resource document, PARSEC Group President, Strider Sauer, stated "We’ve been focused on supporting OpenVMS customers since 1986 and will continue to do so for many years to come. With our team and contributions from the OpenVMS community, we believe some of those resources will be replaced as we continue adding content to this resource page, and we encourage users to reach out to us with content suggestions and ways of enhancing the document, and letting us know how we can support them.”
+In closing, as VSI continues pioneering the future of OpenVMS and PARSEC Group enables current users with expert support, training & consulting services for all versions, users on the oldest version or the most current can be confident that their OpenVMS needs will continually be met with solutions and support.
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