<<I recall we had some discussion (and warning) of this at the last IPROF
but I don't recall exactly what was said.   Does anyone else?

I seem to recall INTEREX saying they needed to reduce costs but this may
prove to be a false economy to some.>>


I recall  a couple of issues, though I'm sure there are others:
1) The amount of time that HP's people spend at IPROF. With some of the
inefficiencies and redundancies that we had last year, I think that Harry
felt, legitimately, that he wasn't getting enough bang for the buck
having key people spending 3-4 days at IPROF.
2) The last two IPROFs were significant money-losers for Interex. They
can provide accurate figures (if they want to do so), but I recall that
they were something like
a) The break-even point for IPROF '96 was around 120 paid attendees, and
barely over or slightly under 100 actually showed up
b) IPROF '97 break even was closer to 100, but only something like 82
made it
So Interex lost quite a bit, probably in excess of USD20K, on the last
two conferences. Clearly not something they can keep doing. Though you
could make a case that they to some extent "brought it on themselves" by
having the Interex conference department take over the operation from Ken
and the handful of users, Interex and HP people who put together the
first few IPROFs on at least a partially volunteer basis.

I think your "false economy" is an important issue. If IPROF '98 costs
the same as '97, but delivers less content due to schedule compression
and increased conflicts, I'm getting less bang for my buck too. This
makes it likely that more people will decide that it isn't worth it.
Which means that it's a losing proposition again. So the price the next
year goes up again. So fewer people come. It only takes a couple of
rounds of this and the conference is history, because Interex can't find
the 20 people willing to pay $2000 for a 1-1/2 day conference.

With regard to the HP-participant issue, I think that the schedule can be
made more "HP friendly":
1) Start the conference with a half-day-or-so general session, where most
or all of the "entire group" HP presentations could be done.
2) Schedule the "big name" SIG meetings like MPE and IMAGE so that they
are done by the end of the second day. For practical purposes, these are
also "entire group" activities; I think pretty much everyone attending
the "1998 MPE Programmers Forum" is going to be running MPE, and I think
we only had one Allbase-only-no-IMAGE attendee last time.
3) Work with HP to schedule the other 2 days such that, to the maximum
extent possible, the HP engineers, supervisors, and managers that are
involved in a limited number of SIGs can visit everything within their
field of interest on the same day.

Obviously, these ideas need refinement, and some of them may turn out to
be OTL. But I'm convinced that we can make IPROF more effective for
everyone, though it means that attendees will have to do more preparation
beforehand. But I'm also convinced that a 30-hour IPROF represents a
problem.

Steve