HP 3000 - HP's Exit From The 3000 Ecosystem

HP's Exit From The 3000 Ecosystem

After the enterprise computing market shifted toward commodity Unix systems from a wide range of vendors—systems which HP had also been promoting—in November 2001 Hewlett-Packard announced that a period it called the end-of-life for the HP 3000 would wrap up at the end of 2006, and that no new systems would be sold by HP after 2003. In early 2006, Hewlett-Packard announced that limited vendor support for the HP 3000 would be extended by two years for certain clients or geographic regions. In September 2007, HP once more extended its support for the systems, offering Mature Product Support without Sustaining Engineering (ending its creation of software patches). Some patches had been built and tested inside HP, but lacked customer base testing by the end of 2008. HP made these patches available after the end of 2010 (an Excel list of beta patches). By 2011, HP had extended a special provision to 3000 customers which granted them free access to patches, unlike the rest of HP enterprise line which was forced in 2010 to adopt a "pay for patching" support program instead of free patches.