Report from an attendee:

Here's a brief overview of the Toronto version of the "e3000 insider" event
held here yesterday. Presumably it was much the same as the previous day's
event in Montreal. Approximately 60 people attended but there was a sizable
no-show contingent according to the pre-registration list. It was hard to
tell how many customer machines were represented as there were quite a
number of vendors. It was hosted in HP's Toronto office but ably organized
by the MBFoster staff.

Winston, travelling sans entourage, opened the day with a summary of the
"state of the 3000" address, hoping, he said, to convince us that the
machine was indeed keeping up with current technology. He played a number of
video snippets, most from HP World, including Carly's "say something nice
about the 3k to shut them up" remarks from her taped opening and Anne's VW
and Duane's hammer analogies. Winston then elaborated, almost
apologetically, on the analogies, trying to put a positive spin on the cute
little been around forever low tech car and the crude faithful old low tech
brute force weapon. Later (and off line) he admitted these wouldn't have
been his first choices for analogies :-) He went on to present the "5 year
plan" (already a year gone) which was a simplified version of the info Dave
Snow presented at HP World but he did openly mention the "N class" and "A
class" by name. He said that MPE/iX on the Superdome was "a vision", if not
on the Superdome itself (what customer needs that much compute power?) then
likely on later machines which would use the same software partitioning, if
not hardware partitioning, technology. No ground shaking revelations but he
was open, sincere and his remarks were well received. He answered all
questions asked; there were no "someone will get back to you" answers.

Buzzword Birket followed, proving once again his mastery of TLA's and now
XTLA's (extended TLA's). In an hour he covered the capabilities of the 3k in
an increasingly "e" world. He even managed to recycle Winston's "E-nuff"
joke.

After lunch shorter presentations were given by Commerx (the local
iron-monger), Minisoft, Speedware and Cognos. The focus was intended to be
on the web and most vendors stayed on topic. The Commerx guy was kind of
stuck since they asked him not to talk about hardware. Instead he talked
about high availability stuff needed to achieve the "always on" required by
the 'net. Minisoft talked about Web Dimension, Speedware about Autobahn and
Cognos about PH Web. All useful and interesting presentations. The Speedware
guy also included a section on WAP and some new stuff they're doing in this
upcoming market -- future stuff for 3k users today but he assured us we'd be
more interested next year!

The day concluded with a round table (but there were few questions) followed
by a nice wine, cheese and snacks buffet. In summary it was a well run "feel
good" day and worth attending. The Interex Toronto User Group holds
bimonthly meetings and, although a member, I haven't been to one in a couple
of years. This is mostly because of the lack of 3k content as the user group
continues to focus more and more on UX stuff. Not surprisingly several old
acquaintances were in the same boat -- TUG has become largely irrelevant to
us. My lingering question concerns how we get the same messages from this
session to all those 3k sites which were unrepresented.

Following that I spent nearly 2 hours driving 12 miles across the city
through the rain and construction. Definitely the low point of the day!

Regards,
John Pickering
Toronto