In the final week of June, HP provided an answer to the romancing that IBM has been applying to the HP 3000 channel partners and consultants. About 60 participants, some from application suppliers and others from the utility software community, enjoyed HP’s hospitality and its vision of their future in an event at the HP Cupertino campus over three days. HP’s presentations outlined the opportunity of its database option HP Eloquence as well as migration to Linux-based servers, Unix systems and even a talk from a Microsoft representative. Not overlooking the grease for the wheels of commerce, HP provided every attendee with a digital HP 612 camera, and in the evening took the group to an IMAX film. “HP acted like IBM toward us,” said Terry Floyd, head of the ERP support company and HP 3000 software supplier the Support Group, inc. HP also tried to send a message about its relative lack of concern about IBM’s competition, according to another partner who was on hand. HP said it only expects about one customer in 10 to be considering the iSeries option, based on surveys it’s taken of US sites. One partner at the event thought that HP’s estimate of IBM’s ability to compete was optimistic.