A one-hour chat with CSY General Manager Winston Prather drew 125 users from the US, the UK, Australia and India on 3kworld, with a lively discussion of HP 3000 licensing policies, benchmarking the system, and whether HP would include free third-party software on future MPE/iX shipments.

HP also hinted at a rich set of Internet enhancements in the coming months for the platform, pointing to an early February announcement for more details on things like SSL security for the HP 3000’s Web server.

Prather was joined by CSY’s Worldwide Marketing Manager Christine Martino, who handled a fair percentage of questions regarding the division’s marketing policies and messages for HP’s corporate chiefs to deliver. One user asked if HP CEO Carly Fiorina was in the loop on the 3000.

“We are working directly with Carly’s office to update her on the HP 3000 product line and business,” Martino said. The CEO hasn’t mentioned the 3000 product line in public since she took office in July, although she pledged HP’s support of it in a BusinessWeek seminar in early December.

Prather said that HP would consider including third-party packages in the fundamental operating system tape for HP 3000s in the future. Some software suppliers for the HP 3000 are hoping to include free software for the platform.

“I’m open to this, but only when it’s really a good thing,” Prather said. “I don’t want FOS to become a huge marketing vehicle for every third party. Remember, it takes disc space, etc.”

Bill Conley, whose US Computer Corp. is being sued by HP for alleged use of the SS_CONFIG program to illegally reconfigure HP 3000s during 1998, posted many questions to try to outline division policies on licensing. Conley asked, “will HP come out with a formal procedure for the transfer of these licenses?”

Prather replied “We do have a formal procedure. It’s been documented in the past and is reiterated in a new document that will include both policy and procedure. We have also been working with the 3000 NewsWire to communicate the SLT procedure to users.”

Chat attendees pressed hard to get more commitment to bringing the HP 3000 marketing message to a wider audience than the solutions base. “Good marketing to me would mean getting the 3000 message out in front of the CEOs, and not just the technical staffs,” said one chat participant when Martino asked “What would good publicity look like to you?”

John Saylor of Quest Software asked what HP has been doing to attract application software vendors to the 3000. Prather replied that “over the past year we have created a team to partner with existing and NEW ISVs. We’ve had some really good success with middleware vendors.”

Chat participant Michael Gueterman asked if the 3000 division would be supplying industry-standard benchmarks for the HP 3000s. Prather said that “I don’t think industry standard benchmarking is an effective way to use our resources. Alternatively, we have invested in benchmarking directly with our top ISVs. Then we have tuned the OS with this data. This ensures that the performance gains are real, and not just ‘benchmarkmanship.’ ”

Prather went on to note that CSY has in-house benchmarks for Smith-Gardner and HBOC/Amisys applications. “We take the data from these benchmarks and tune the OS. These environments are much more representative of real customers than any TPC-C, -D, etc.”

Gueterman replied that “The tuning is obviously necessary, but benchmarking (of any sort) needs to show a comparison between differing systems in order to help out on the marketing end of things.”

Detailed advertising of the IMAGE/SQL benefit might not be part of HP’s Year 2000 plans, by Martino’s account. “New customers don’t need to see IMAGE advertised, they are buying a complete solution,” she said. “Existing customers already know how great IMAGE is! Most of our advertising will be around a full solution. IMAGE may be a part of that — but that may be too low-level for an ad campaign.”

Other topics in the chat included questions about an object-oriented COBOL for the HP 3000 (Prather said that users should be sure to communicate their desires to the SIG-COBOL group about this); benchmarking of the new XP256 disk arrays with HP 3000s (tests have been done, but no promise was made to share the results); and Java enhancements for the HP 3000 (Prather mentioned that the HotSpot technology was on its way to the HP 3000).

Prather did promise that a white paper will be distributed in February on the many new options for creating GUI interfaces for HP 3000 applications. Martino said that CSY is making the paper available on 3kworld immediately.

“There are lots of new GUI technologies either on the market today or coming very soon,” Prather said. “We’ve been working with many of them to determine how to help get them the visibility to customers.”