HP World 2001: Homers, cash and a song of praise

Conference delivers even in a down year without much news

By Ron Seybold

In a city known for working, there was plenty of play at HP World 2001, where magic, home runs and loose cash brightened the Chicago experience. HP didn’t arrive with a lot of “new news,” as the e3000 division’s Alvina Nishimoto called details about the free WebWise Secure Apache Web Server coming soon. But things surfaced that drew applause and hope, some unexpected.

Like the new HP 3000 application for Customer Relationship Management. CRM is a buzzword as hot as Sammy Sosa’s August bat for the Chicago Cubs, who were in town at Wrigley Field all week. The 3000 now has a CRM application from an unexpected author. Brad Tashenberg was cruising the show floor with a big grin and a copy of his application’s manual, which he was pleased to note he wrote himself. Tashenberg, who’s become the Chief Technology Officer for Bradmark over the last year or so after founding and leading the firm for years, created the Customer Relationship System for the 3000, with a Visual Basic front end using pane technology. In all the years I’ve known Brad, he never looked happier or prouder of an accomplishment.

Nobix let attendees grab for flying cash in a booth on the HP World show floor

The conference floor had smiles in abundance. Magic and sleight of hand were easy to find. At one booth an escape artist wriggled out of a straightjacket all day long, while IBM delivered tricks from a magician working from a corner of its large booth. The 3000 community had its own practitioner of prestidigitation, Stan Sieler working from the Adager booth. Sieler did close-up tricks with playing cards that left people scratching their heads and asking to examine his deck. The one-on-one sessions happened while everybody was seated on large, inflated balls in the booth, simple and adorned only with a massive, five-foot high Adager cube. The balls were the best way to relieve the stress of sitting in conference room chairs for hours, and the layout emphasized Adager’s show theme of eliminating clutter in databases and IT choices.

Over at Wrigley Field, Sosa was un-cluttering the bases. Slammin’ Sammy belted five home runs in the first four days of the week, including one afternoon when he cleared the ivy walls three times as the Cubs punished the Brewers. Baseballs weren’t the only thing flying in the Windy City. People could stand in a enclosed glass booth at the Nobix stand, while cash swirled around them and they grabbed as much as they could hold in 15 seconds. Exhibitors were thinking hard about how to grab the attention of the crowds, a group smaller than last year’s show and off 25 percent from Interex’s projections of 10,000. While the final figures won’t be in for a few weeks, everyone acknowledged the flat economy had taken its toll for this year.

At right, Birket Foster (l) accepts HP’s 2001 3000 Contributor award from HP GM Winston Prather; at left, George Stachnik plays “The Ballad of MPE”

M.B. Foster Associates seemed undaunted by the trend, working its customary front-row space hard with giveaways of the new slim Palm Pilot 505s. There was plenty new at the booth as well, with a secure version of ODBC, COM component builder software to make its e3000 offerings “dot-net ready,” and two-phase commit for IMAGE/SQL and Allbase. Founder Birket Foster was honored as this year’s winner of the HP 3000 Contributor’s Award. At the finale of GM Winston Prather’s keynote speech, Foster and a host of 3000 partners followed the guitar stylings of George Stachnik in singing multiple verses of “The Ballad of MPE.”

HP shows attendees an example of what they don’t get using MPE/iX

Cynics might have thought such performances were like whistling past a graveyard, given the current climate of layoffs and economic stalls. HP’s managers got the news during the week about who would have to go, and no division was spared, but most of them were shouldering their corporate burden with an eye toward better times. It seemed to my eye the 3000 community in Chicago simply dipped into its legendary survival skills, as we saw one tools firm after another re-embrace their MPE business. Even Cognos took steps toward helping 3000 sites get orders approved for new systems, announcing it was cutting its licensing fees by 40 percent through the end of October.

Sustenance was never far away in the week, what with a dazzling array of restaurants in the town. We enjoyed the famed flaming cheese at Greektown’s Parthenon, fabulous pheasant and stroganoff at Russian Tea Time, and sinfully good Deep Dish at Pizzeria Due, after the cuisine du Wrigley at Monday’s doubleheader. But the biggest laughter and smiles of the week might have come inside Prather’s keynote speech.

Just a few slides into the GM’s PowerPoint presentation, the infamous Blue Screen of Death from Windows reared its ugly head. The room exploded in laughter, and Prather got a sheepish look on his face and said, “We may have to see how I can wing the rest of this without slides.” NT and e3000 advocate Denys Beauchemin, who’d introduced Prather, rushed to the stage to help him recover from the crash. Then Prather pulled the string on the trick. An animated arrow crept into the Blue Screen of Death, including the note that “The value about MPE a lot of times might be what you DON’T get with it.”

Prather added, “Look close, it’s not broken,” when Denys tried to reboot the system. If there was any booting done at the Chicago show, it was simply bootstrapping for more growth in the year to come — relying on MPE’s number one rating in Interex’s survey at the show among all of HP’s platforms.