So many decisions regarding application platform and architecture are today
driven by the business sector. Business managers, worry about operating
costs, a solutions openness to partners and suppliers, and a solutions
scalability - they don't give a hoot about the actual HW/OS. This trend
seems to be huge factor in the rise of SAP, Bahn, PeopleSoft, Clarify,
Remedy, and so on... - it's the end solution that counts, not the individual
parts. To that end HP marketing has to focus on the message of complete
turn-key solutions. See recent acquisition of OpenSkies.

So how is HP going to attract more packaged solutions, how are they going to
gain respectability in this space, given a complete lack of attention to
this space for the last 10 years. I doubt they'll convince SAP to port R/3
to MPE.

Maybe the HP3000 should manage my local Cable company - since they can't
seem to keep their systems running worth a damn.

Jonathan van den Berg
Premier Software Technologies
www: www.premiersoft.com