All:

Duane wrote:

[Snip]
We recently responded to a competitive joint bid (multiple
 organizations) where one of the organizations already has an HP 3000
(and I believe an office of HP is located in the general vicinity).
Unfortunately, our HP 3000 only solution was downgraded because of just
that - it runs on the HP 3000.
To paraphrase the site already owning the HP 3000:
"We are NOT confident of HP's commitment to the 3000, and in fact feel HP
has been sending STRONG messages that they are abandoning MPE in the not
too distant future."
Ouch.

Then Jim Phillips wrote:
We have talked and
>screamed and cajoled and cried and tried everything short of an LBO and
>what have we got to show for it?  Some trifles thrown our way to keep
>the children quiet.  No great commitment to MPE.  No great commitment
>to Image.


Okay,

Not that a multi-billion dollar company needs me to come to their aid -
but let's not be too hard on HP and their stance on the HP3000.

I don't believe that allocating the entire marketing and R&D budgets of
HP to the HP3000 could materially change the new system sales of the
HP3000 in the general computer server market.  The general computing new
server market is currently heading towards UNIX and NT.

I just can't see a business case for HP that allows them to make a return
on investment pushing the HP3000 over Unix or NT for new system sales
where customers were not previously biased to the HP3000.  But there does
appear to be enough of a return to maintain the HP3000 and provide
lightweight enhancements to both the OS and TurboImage.  And somebody
brilliant at HP made sure that MPEiX and HPUX could be hosted on the same
box so new technology investment for HP UNIX servers can more
cost-effectively be used for MPEiX.

So let's look on the bright side.  HP has a relatively small, but bright
and talented team of engineers working on MPEiX and TurboImage that
continues to service the needs of the fiercely loyal installed customer
base.  But, we are not going to see the next killer OS from this group
nor or we going to see TurboImage enhancements that compare to the three
main data base vendors who have hundreds of engineers working on new
state of the art data warehouse retrievals or network computing
initiatives.  But hey, who am I to complain that third parties will need
to continue to fill in the TurboImage gaps.

Once, a few years back, three of the most experienced and loyal 3000ist
at DISC sat down and asked several questions to determine if the HP3000
was 'dead' and if we should re-focus our energies from the 3000.  We
asked questions like the following:

1) What is the annual number of engineers working on MPEiX and TurboImage
over the past 10 years?
2) What is annual number of new HP3000 only applications released on
MPEiX over the past 10 years?
3) What is annual number of schools using the HP3000 for teaching
computer science over the past 10 years?
4) What is the annual number of new HP3000 sold to non-3000 sites over
the past 10 years?
5) What is the annual maintenance dollars for HP3000 hardware and
software over the past 10 years?
6) What is the percentage of new HP3000 servers compared to all other new
servers over the past 10 years?

We had several more questions and knew that we couldn't get HP or anyone
else to answer but we and I'm sure most of the readers of this list can
speculate that the graphs would show a downward trend.  So we came to the
following conclusions:

1) The HP3000 market for selling new systems to new customers was
shrinking and would continue to shrink and there wasn't much that HP or
anyone else could do about it.
2) The HP3000 installed base, however would not die for a number of years
and the CPU upgrade and additional CPU market would continue to be
strong.
3) HP would continue servicing the HP3000 installed base funded by the
hardware and software maintenance stream until it falls below a critical
mass which will take several more years.

I think we came to the same conclusions as the economic and strategic
planning groups at HP and with a slightly smaller budget of a couple
six-packs.  Of course, the HP folks had to look at real data, we just
speculated on ours.  And they probably couldn't drink beer which
certainly sped up our conclusions.

So, I hope we don't spend too much time in this list trying to get HP to
do some 'feel good' marketing for the sake of HP3000 loyalists.  I just
don't see it causing an expansion of the HP3000 to new sites.  Mind you,
I would love to be wrong on this topic.  And, Duane, I certainly like to
see people share the 3000 successes and failures with this group.  I'm
sorry your latest one was not a success.

Terry O'Brien
Dynamic Information Systems Corporation
Voice: (303) 444-4000
Email: [log in to unmask]