At 06:10 PM 12/3/95 EET, Esko Lahdensivu wrote:
>        That is exactly what HP Marketing is all about.  If I were
>        a customer looking for a system for serious, reliable
>        business transaction processing I would probably not even
>        bother to ask HP, because they only seem to selling
>        Deskjets, Laserjets, HP9000 Unixes and calculators.  Some
>        one might tell me that they do have this HP3000 running
>        MPE, but that's "old iron with proporietary o/s" - so
>        don't bother !
 
I'd an interesting experience today, taking part in a "professional"
training course on Client/Server Computing and Distributed Databases run by
the Australian Computer Society.  The course is presented by a Senior
Lecuturer from the Uni of NSW.  A lot is made during the course of the Codd
guidelines for selection of a DDBMS.  It is interesting that when comparing
a networked system using HP's TurboIMAGE, Quest's NetBase and DISC's Omnidex
against the non-vendor specific products like Sybase, Oracle and Ingress,
and other vendor specific systems like DEC's RDB, I found HP's 3000 offering
to be the equal if not better in most cases.  Okay, I'm biased by my
previous experiences, but I think in a blind feature set comparison it
stands pretty well.
 
Features such as local processing of local requests, consistent locking
strategy, handling of deadlocks, partial and full data replication, network
independence all came up well.  Add on the IMAGE/SQL and the picuture looks
pretty complete. Not surprisingly though, none present at the course (except
myself) had ever heard of IMAGE or the HP3000.  Very disappointing.
 
What can HP do to market the HP3000 better?  I really don't know...if the
market isn't going to listen, what's the point of spending all that money.
Its like the job ads that state you must have an Masters degree or better in
order to apply.  Does it mean only Masters or better could do the job well?
Certainly not, but if you don't have it, you won't get in the door.
Similarly companys are demanding Unix solutions, whether that is the best
solution for them or not.
----
Jim Wowchuk                    Internet:    [log in to unmask]
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