HP’s most loyal customers and its most dedicated division had their annual heart-to-heart talk at HP World. What attendees heard was plenty of explanations, some apologies, but few new promises beyond those already in progress at a Commercial Systems Division (CSY) consumed with major platform release work.

CSY brought its brain trust intact to the two-hour meeting at HP World. General Manager Winston Prather addressed many questions, along with R&D chief Dave Wilde and worldwide marketing manager Christine Martino. Also representing HP during the exchange of customer ideals and opinions were Product Planning Manager Dave Snow and CSY customer support leader Dave DuPlantier. MPE Forum member Bill Lancaster, who was given an award by CSY an hour earlier for his contributions to the platform and community, moderated the roundtable.

The majority of roundtable time was spent on considering the e3000’s future, perhaps a nod to Prather’s keynote address theme earlier in the afternoon. But customers at the roundtable focused on what is not yet available for the platform: system administrator-level improvements, adequate communication about development opportunities, a complete match with peripherals released for HP-UX, and other growth issues.

CSY leaders worked to portray the 3000’s relationship that’s ending with Oracle as an opportunity to promote HP’s IMAGE/SQL and Allbase databases to developers. “As we try to work with new application providers, there are clear advantages to those databases,” Wilde said. “We should look at ways to get new channel partners excited about IMAGE/SQL and Allbase, and help them understand those advantages.”

Martino explained that despite “a tremendous amount of effort” on CSY’s part, Oracle “just isn’t interested in doing anything” more with the HP 3000. “We’ve got to admit it and move on, and come up with specific solutions for the small number of customers and partners that are affected by this decision.”

The departure of Oracle prompted customers to question how much they could count on existing partnerships for 3000 technology. Wesley Setree of Print-Pak said, “We’ve seen partnerships come and go. How do we trust any other partnerships coming up, and how long are they going to last?”

Prather replied that one measure of trust might be a trend of a growing amount of new technology that’s arrived for the platform, such as WAP, XML, Java and Web application servers.

“A lot of that stuff wasn’t here a couple of years ago,” Prather said. “The test is in time, and we’re working hard with alliance managers for all our partners. We dropped the ball a couple years ago with our partners, and because of that many of them felt unloved and left. We recognized that and are trying to fix that.”

Customers shouldn’t anticipate a sudden surge of platform-specific advertising as a show of love. Martino said that CSY has spent much of its advertising budget in “solutions-focused advertising, and we’re going to continue that more and more. We’ve gotten a bigger bang for our buck by doing solution-based advertising. The bulk of our marketing dollars should be used for demand-generating activity, to reach out directly to our installed base. Advertising is not necessarily the best vehicle for that.”

Prather concurred. “The relationship between cost and return on the Wall Street Journal advertising is way off, in my personal opinion,” he said. “Executives tell me we need awareness of the 3000’s capabilities, not a headline in the Wall Street Journal.” Martino said CSY is increasing emphasis on its customer reference stories as a way of illustrating those capabilities.

Improving the improvement ballot

Lancaster made an opening statement at the roundtable about plans to improve the System Improvement Ballot (SIB) process, so the customer survey can track more closely with HP’s commitments for the 3000. Leaders of the Special Interest Groups have complained that the SIGs, which provide much of the input for enhancement requests, saw few commitments to their improvement requests this year.

The moderator said that “We’ve come to the conclusion that the SIB process needs a little bit of tweaking. We need to have more information back from HP on their development plans, what they’re currently working on and examining, to give back to the voters and get a broader scale perspective on the choices HP is facing.” The Forum will be working with CSY to make this flow of information from the division labs to the SIG leaders and the Forum a reality, he added. Details will be announced on the 3000-L mailing list and the comp.sys.hp.mpe newsgroup.

HP’s comments on this year’s SIB requests indicated that requests were deferred in preference to “big ticket items” involving capacity growth. But some customers at the roundtable argued CSY should addressing a broader range of large growth and small tactical items in 3000 technology adoption.

“You cannot just address the big picture. You must also address at some level the small tactical things,” said SIGCOBOL chair Jeanette Nutsford. She added that she believes customers appreciate HP’s initiative to pursue larger scale items, even when they’re not requested in surveys like the SIB.

One tactical level request to improve the GETUPDATE intrinsic, so it will retrieve and update records in one call without a prior DBGET, has been prototyped by the lab. The change would save overhead and simplify programming. But section manager Jon Bale said “It’s not clear what the value of that might be. We spent a day evaluating what it would take to do that, but we seriously doubt that’s the highest priority request of the IMAGE community, in spite of the fact that it got high votes in the SIB. I’m going to continue discussing it on 3000-L.”

Lab R&D manager Dave Wilde noted that within HP, CEO Carly Fiorina keeps telling executives “I don’t want you to figure out how to do A or B. I want to do A and B.” Lancaster noted that desire sums up the 3000 customers’ desires on getting large scale and tactical improvements. Wilde replied, “I think it’s big A, little B.”

“A lot of the functionality we’ve been working on for the past year and a half you’ll start to see come out in the next year,” general manager Prather said. “It’s just a matter of balance.” Wilde said HP will share “the things that are driving us and what we’re thinking” with SIG leaders.

Peripherals and HP communication

One roundtable question asked why more new peripherals haven’t been available for the 3000 platform at the same time as their HP 9000 availability. Wilde replied that the 3000 hasn’t trailed as much as it did in the past.

“It continues to be a challenge for us,” he said. “I can point to areas where we’ve made a ton of progress in the past few years: peripherals in our disk and tape road map, and our disk array road map. We’re not totally up to date, and we’re working very hard.

“We’re going to try to lead in a few places, too,” he added, saying the Web application development space is one area where CSY has been introducing other HP organizations to partners.

Customer Jim Rogers applauded the new programs such as the HP Garage and the CSSP developer’s program, then asked, “Why do you make them so hard to find out about?”

Prather replied, “It’s not intentional. I’ve been at HP for 18 years, and this is the most change in the company I’ve ever experienced. We have a lot of change going on in the company, with the vision of the end product being much better for you. To be honest, the road to get there is rough. It’s a huge change, but in the end it will be much better. You won’t feel like you’re working with 83 different companies, but right now we’re not there. I think it’s the right vision, and hopefully there will be some progress you’ll see.”