Jim Kramer wrote:

> If the 3000 is significantly more cost effective (transactions / $) than others
> per TPC, I would think that would be a great selling point and reason enough to
> do the benchmarks.

Which is one of the reasons I posted the question (thanks, Jim). The
other part, the part that Jon Broz didn't address (and cut out of his
quote of my post) is what I said the first time:

> In our mixed environment of HP-UX, Sun Unix, AS/400, AIX, and MPE,
> this kind of info could prove quite helpful.

As a matter of fact, Jon makes my point for me. He writes (and pardon my
snipping):

>... in the world of HP3000 sales, we are not usually dealing with
> people who are comparing the performance of the HP3000 against another
> platform.

I think you should be if your product is as good as HP has led all of us
to believe.

> And isn't that the primary purpose of an "industry standard"
> benchmark?...

Yes, and it is *exactly* what we *are* trying to do. Why? As Jon says,

>... Or, (2) we are dealing with a customer who does not have an HP3000,
> but is looking at the HP3000 because that's where the application
> runs.  That is, the application is driving the decision to purchase
> the HP3000... In my current experience, the applications that are
> bringing new customers to the HP3000 only run on the HP3000.  If I am
> wrong on that, please do not hesitate to let me know.

In our case, our new parent company, Seabury & Smith, has a similar
application to ours (both home-grown), but they run 90% AS/400s. The
combined IT departments are looking at consolidation (they call it
"rationalization"). Now, if HP could give us a TPC or other *industry
accepted* benchmark (because I don't believe in a cross-platform
"standard" either, but if a benchmark is *accepted* by an industry,
well, who am I to argue?) that we could show our new CIO, it could make
the difference between "happy days are here again," and "another one
bites the dust." It takes a lot of effort to overcome inertia.

So yes, Jon, there are similar applications running on different
platforms, so you are wrong (you said to tell you so), and (being blunt
here) HP will wind up *losing existing MPE customers* with such a narrow
focus and unwillingness to invest some money for the potential *gain*
they could receive in new customers and new orders. I believe it's
called "competition in the marketplace," last time I checked.

(I hope everyone now fully understands why I asked the question.)

My .02
Patrick (who had a laborious 3-day weekend on-call and hasn't recovered
yet, so please excuse the tone & insert std disclaimers)
--
Patrick Santucci
Technical Services Systems Programmer
KVI, a division of Seabury & Smith
Visit our site! http://www.kvi-ins.com
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"If they try to rush me, I always say, 'I've only got
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