As HP turned up its campaign to get recognized as a major provider of Internet resources, an unfortunate quote from one of its top executives is sparking a customer campaign for e3000 recognition. The notice that customers want for the e3000 is from HP’s corporate officers. A published article quoted HP president of Enterprise and Commercial Business Ann Livermore as saying the company has a “multi-operating system strategy: HP-UX, Linux and NT.” The quote appeared in a ZDNet Interactive Week article by Charles Babcock, who surmised that customers have little interest in any operating system other than those named by Livermore. When the HP 3000 faithful of the 3000-L mailing list got a look at the HP quote, it touched off another round of pleas for HP’s top officials to notice its oldest computing success — the one unnamed by Livermore in Babcock’s article.

The absence of HP’s corporate notice of the platform prompted an online brainstorming session to cook up a logo and slogan for the platform, an equivalent of the Linux penguin. At presstime the favorite was an owl to represent the e3000, while the slogan was still being debated. One channel partner of 20 years had a representative working on shirts to be sold on the Internet and worn at the upcoming HP World conference, as a show of support for the platform in front of Livermore, who will give the keynote speech at the conference’s first full day. Rick Gilligan of Computing and Software Enterprises took full umbrage at the lack of HP’s marketing for the platform his company supports as it sells an e3000 portfolio management application. Gilligan was putting the finishing touches on a project to sell the embroidered t-shirts and high-quality polo shirts over a Web site, with secure credit card sales, at hpworld.halibut.com. “My issues are basically with the appearance that higher levels of HP are out-of-sync with what CSY is doing, its product, and what CSY and their products can offer to HP (profits from HP inventions) and customers (reliability, forward compatibility),” Gilligan said in an Internet posting. The channel partner didn’t have direct criticism of the 3000 division-level (CSY) efforts, but wants the shirts to convey “the message we want to get across to the management of HP above CSY: Please market your inventions (MPE/iX and TurboIMAGE) more effectively than you have been."

Customer discussion really cranked up after CSY worldwide marketing manager Christine Martino addressed customers’ concerns in an Internet posting. Martino’s message, her first direct to the customers on 3000-L since she took her job in December of 1998, said “HP as a company remains committed to this platform and to its rich customer base.” But her message also reflected the reality of HP’s marketing efforts, saying “HP’s corporate strategy continues to focus on winning Unix, NT and Linux market share. Many times executives are drawn into comments that are directly in response to market movement by our competitors. In these cases, it is critical that our external message is clear and concise. Exclusion of MPE/iX in these situations should not be construed as a lack of commitment by HP or its executives to the platform and customer base.” Martino said her team in CSY “will continue to work on new technologies, programs and communications around the HP e3000 — and to have it better represented in our executives’ comments and presentations."

Despite the CSY intentions, few of the installed base customers on the 3000-L list expressed much encouragement in Martino’s report. Wirt Atmar, founder of channel partner AICS and long time advocate for the platform, renewed his proposal that the division spin off from HP, to give it the ability to market its products more freely. “The solution is to make CSY a wholly-owned, but otherwise completely independent subsidiary of HP,” Atmar wrote. “The advantage that this newly named, privately-held company would have is that it would be free to openly advertise the value of its solutions — and freely and very directly compare them to the alternatives: IBM, Sun, Oracle, Microsoft, and even HP's other offerings.” Meanwhile, another 3000 advocate and channel partner counselled patience with the changing of the HP guard, which he suggested was still in progress. Observing a fair number of mentions of the e3000 on HP’s corporate Web site, Alfredo Rego said, “We should be a bit patient, perhaps, because we might just have some kind of a phase shift going on here — HP’s corporate executives might be on the same wavelength as their Web designers — not to mention the CSY folks — but their phases might be a bit off, and we should gently allow them to realign themselves.” At press time 3kworld.com was hosting a chat to gather more input from customers on the campaign for corporate recognition. It promised to forward comments to HP executives; a transcript is online.