CSY goes virtual; Prather exits division

R&D chief Wilde becomes HP’s “go-to guy” for community

Winston Prather has exited HP’s 3000 division, but he has architected the retirement of the CSY General Manager title in HP’s post-merger reorganization — because CSY is disappearing as a division, becoming a virtual HP organization to be led by former R&D chief Dave Wilde.

After completing work leading the Business Critical Systems merger integration team in a “clean room” job for the newly-merged HP, Prather was promoted to the new High Performance Technical Computing division. Prather said his new group is larger than CSY, and it’s wrapped firmly around the products and technology of the former Digital, Apollo, and Convex tech offerings.

Since CSY no longer exists on any HP org chart, the division’s customers will now be represented in HP by Dave Wilde, who until the May 7 merger was the R&D manager for the former HP 3000 division. Now “he’s the leader of the 3000 group,” Prather said. Wilde becomes the third and perhaps last 3000 lab manager to be promoted to head up HP’s 3000 operations.

Wilde, who’s been speaking on behalf of the former division for most of 2002, will lead a group of HP staffers who have been merged into another HP operation, the Total Customer Experience and Support Division (TCSD). That group is headed by Barbara Bacile, with a mandate to produce a positive “total customer experience” for 3000 owners preparing for HP’s exit from their market space.

Ross MacDonald, a lab section manager for the 3000 group, takes over R&D duties for a product line with just 16 months of active sales left. Wilde, whose 3000 background includes marketing posts for the former CSY, will now lead 3000 operations from a marketing seat, joining a cross-product marketing team led by a former HP 9000 marketing chief. HP is stepping firmly away from organization by product line.

“I will officially be part of Mark Hudson’s marketing team,” Wilde said. “I also expect to work with Barb Bacile as needed and to stay in sync, although I expect that Ross MacDonald will be empowered to lead the R&D activities. Most of my interactions on the R&D side will be directly with Ross, much like Winston worked directly with me when I was the R&D manager.”

Wilde said the reorganization makes both Hudson and Bacile “responsible stakeholders for key parts of the e3000 business, and therefore it is important that they are appropriately involved. A part of my role is to make sure that happens, while recognizing and being sensitive to the fact that they have many responsibilities.”

Despite his dual reports to two groups inside HP’s Business Critical Systems organization, Wilde says he’s got the ability to decide what’s left of HP’s involvement with the HP 3000. “I have the charter to drive the business decisions,” he said, “involving stakeholders as appropriate.”

Prather believes the shift away from product-based divisions is meant to give the old CSY staff some confidence to remain in their jobs.

“We’re trying to balance having a structure that’s focused on the 3000 — which I think we’ve accomplished virtually — with putting the employees in places that removed any concerns they might have,” he said. “It shows them that at the appropriate time in the future, they can evolve to something else. The feedback from the employees was pretty good.”

Those CSY lab employees — who customers might argue will be the most tangible asset left inside HP for the 3000 community — will do their evolving from inside TCSD. Prather said TCSD is not a support division, despite the name of the group, but “an R&D division that’s not the standard HP-UX Unix labs.” He added that he’s the architect of HP’s organizational endgame for its 3000 operation.

“I decided it was better to put the group in a team that was focused on customer satisfaction,” Prather said. Developing hardware and software diagnostics for HP’s servers is also part of TCSD, he explained, offering evidence that it’s not a support division. TCSD division head Bacile also gets reports from new 3000 R&D leader McDonald, who also reports to Wilde.

Wilde direct reports to Hudson, who leads a group that markets all HP Enterprise Systems server offerings. The move puts HP’s 3000 marketing team in a group alongside those promoting Linux, Unix and NT solutions, a consolidated structure HP has pursued in the past through an Americas marketing center. But CSY always had dedicated marketing staff of its own, up to the day the division became a virtual group.

Hudson, who worked in CSY marketing many years ago, will lead a group changed with delivering “a consistent and compelling message” on HP servers, including those from Prather’s new division. Christine Martino, the last person to hold a title of Worldwide Marketing Manager for the HP 3000, has left CSY to head up the carrier-grade Linux server business known as TSY. That’s the division which Prather worked for as GM since the spring of 2001, duties he held while HP decided the fate of its future with the HP 3000.

The term general manager didn’t sit well with Prather when asking him about his new job title, or that of Wilde’s. “Just think of us as heads of our organizations, for now,” he said, reflecting a bit of work still to be done on HP’s internal reorganization.

But Wilde is “the go-to guy” for the 3000 community from now on, he added, making decisions on things like HP’s licensing policies beyond 2003, and when HP will start working with OpenMPE Inc. to make an MPE license possible for a hardware emulator to help homesteading customers stick with their platform. Wilde has been leading the lengthy HP investigations on OpenMPE development, including meetings with the OpenMPE board members at this spring’s Interex e3000 Solutions Symposium.

As for the employees in CSY, Prather said that “not one employee is doing anything different” as of mid-May, with 3000 offices still in place in California and Bangalore, India and no head count reductions underway. Prather couldn’t promise that 3000 staff in HP wouldn’t become part of the expected 15,000 layoffs resulting from the merger. He also didn’t think that CSY has ceased to exist, except in the sense that it’s no longer an HP division.

“As far as a group of people dedicated to the 3000, it has not ceased to exist,” Prather said. The reorganization “is a focus on employees, and trying to do the right thing by them to ensure their long-term career path. It sets us up to meet customers’ needs in the long run. We needed our marketing teams and R&D teams to stick around for many years. Having them in a silo-ed organization, where they continued to be concerned about not being needed caused retention problems.”