OpenEdge discontinued on AIX

[ben_huntsman]

Hi there-
Does anyone know much about why AIX was discontinued as a platform? So OpenEdge now only supports Windows and Linux x86? That is sad to see given how many platforms it used to run on. Were there that few AIX customers? The AIX platform still has certain advantages in terms of scalability and performance over Linux + x86. Anyone else disappointed?

Thanks in advance for any details, and also the co-misery!

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

I believe it was just a numbers game. Every AIX migration I saw in the last several years was from AIX, not to AIX. Yes, lots of people have been on it for years and don't want to migrate. But ultimately this is a business decision. Every additional platform that a vendor supports increases its R&D costs, support costs, and time to market with new features. If the revenue streams of licensing, maintenance, and services from that platform decrease year over year, due to both migrations away from AIX and away from OpenEdge altogether, then at some point in no longer makes financial sense to support that platform going forward.

I'm not privy to the internal deliberations at PSC or the financial numbers, but I have to think their justification for this decision resembles the above.

Note that OE on AIX will still be supported on 11.7.x and 12.2.x as long as they remain in their Sunset phases, i.e. for several years yet.

 

[ben_huntsman]

I'm sure you are right. I don't necessarily expect a transparent answer, but I do wonder what the cutoff number was for number of seats on AIX that they felt was no longer enough to justify maintaining the platform. Especially with the likelihood being that AIX customers would be running larger environments and with higher scalability and uptime requirements, and deeper pockets. I also would have thought that IBM would have advocated harder or tried to make some deals, as having a major ISV abandoning the platform is a big deal for them, especially since Progress doesn't build for Power Linux.