November 2004

Consortium collects companies
for one-stop 3000 solutions

Resource 3000 convenes organizational meeting of veteran 3000 firms

Four companies have met this month to begin organizing a new consortium of HP 3000 vendors. The group, which calls itself Resource 3000, touts hundreds of years of combined HP 3000 experience aimed at the 3000 customer which HP has left behind.

An alliance of ORBiT Software, Allegro Consultants, Lund Performance Solutions and Ideal Computer Services will do business together as Resource 3000. ORBiT’s COO Doug Felder said the consortium is already offering combined services.

“We’re open for business now,” Felder said in an interview in late October. (See his Q&A interview, page 22.) In one example of how the consortium will operate, ORBiT, the HP datacenter software provider with offices in Europe and the US, is selling Allegro’s support services for HP 3000 systems through ORBiT’s sales and marketing facilities. The consortium concept spun out of discussions this summer about the HP 3000 marketplace between Felder and Allegro Consultants’ president Steve Cooper.

The discussions led Cooper and Felder to believe that the 3000 customers who are losing HP’s services could represent a growing market, instead of declining one.

“As we started to go down this path, we decided to create a consortium that would cover as many bases as we could,” Felder said, “so the customers could have a one-stop shop.”

About 75 employees work among the four companies, by Felder’s estimate, including software development teams at ORBiT, Lund and Allegro. That number would put Resource 3000 near the top of staff counts among firms which do their primary business with the HP 3000. The consortium will open a Web site by month’s end and plans to mail a in-house newspaper which Lund VP Bill Lancaster has called “Homesteader Times.”

Other plans include pooling the companies’ databases in a single Web-based resource. In a year or more, Resource 3000 could organize as a spin-off corporation or partnership, but Felder said such a move isn’t necessary to start working together.

He added that the consortium’s goal is to take advantage of HP’s departure from the 3000 marketplace.

“It’s a consortium of suppliers that have come together to fill a void, one that was created by HP abandoning the 3000/MPE marketplace,” he said. “We hope to provide all the services HP had, and to give [3000 customers] the opportunity to migrate when they want to.”

ORBiT’s sales and marketing team will promote the products from Lund, along with the phone-in support and onsite services from Allegro and Ideal, respectively. ORBiT doesn’t plan to transfer any of its operations to other consortium members.

ORBiT is expanding its scope of support operations in one European country. German offices are “pushing ORBiT Germany as “anything 3000,’” Felder said, although the German subsidiary has open systems products as well.

Ideal and Lund were recruited, Felder said, to round out the first roster of Resource 3000 members. The consortium wants to assume 3000 business that HP is walking away from, he added, rather than compete with third-party support and backup solutions.

”There’s a group of disenfranchised clients out there who really don’t want to move as fast as HP wants them to move,” he added. “They don’t even want to move to another HP platform, and maybe even want to stick around on the HP 3000. After all, it’s an extremely reliable machine.”

By the end of this month the consortium begins its campaign to educate the customers about what it will offer. The alliance plans to tell the community about its new outlet for those existing 3000 solutions. “People aren’t going to budget for Resource 3000 until they understand what it is,” Felder said, “and what we offer.”