So the best that HP can say about OpenVMS, as it passes its 30th anniversary as a front line operating environment, is that the software still doesn’t have an expiration date. This rates as one of the company’s greater examples of understatement, particularly for a system that seems to offer so much potential to the world of financial transactions in the `Web 2.0’ whirlpool.

OK, it is 30 years old and by definition totally decrepit, yes? Well not necessarily. It would be easy to assume that VMS-based systems reside in some technology backwater owned by companies with too little wit or too much conservatism to invest in new technology. But in practice many of these systems are in service – with HP not daring to call time on them – because they still fulfil an important, business critical role. And nothing has yet been found to supplant them.

That role is running real-time financial transaction management systems in some – quite probably most – of the largest financial institutions around the world. You can have your clever mashups of bits and pieces using Web 2.0 technologies, but when it comes to managing the real numbers of most peoples’ everyday life it is still 30 year-old technology that proves to be the best solution.

What is more, the capabilities of VMS – such as managing fractured, partially completed transactions through to completion – is just the type of financial environment that web-based commerce creates. Indeed, it is almost certainly what many of the mashups of Web 2.0 are most likely to produce if they ever front-up full e-commerce applications.

So rather than damn VMS with faint praise by telling the world it not yet signed the death warrant, why not be bold and push it into a marketplace where there is a definable need? And if VMS is too difficult for most IT departments to understand – it is certainly going to be a strange alien for the Microsoft-generation to deal with – then why not package it as a complete `black-box’ appliance? These days an Itanium-based server, be it a rackable brick or a blade system, with a complete implementation of VMS and enough capacity to run an application must be easily possible. And industry-standard connectivity should now make it a pluggable, interoperable option for many a growing e-commerce site starting to face the many issues of transaction management.

The cry is then often heard that appliances don’t sell – no one wants them. Well, for a lot of applications this is certainly true, but it is not a truism. Take, for example, the network router or switch. This is nothing more than a packaged, application-specific server appliance performing a dedicated, definable task that is both damned difficult for an IT department to engineer from scratch, and damned convenient to acquire off the shelf. That is the perfect definition of a suitable market for an appliance.

That is a market which, arguably, maps well on to transaction management – who cares what the front-end mashup systems are or the back-end databases if there is a proven, reliable transaction management box in the middle? But without such a system available off the shelf, IT departments are likely to find themselves increasingly obliged to try and engineer one from scratch.