Christine Martino, CSY Worldwide Marketing Manager: These are all great ideas, and I want to bring you all into my marketing department.

Fred White: It’s nice to bring you into our marketing department. [Laughter]

Martino: Around the issue of mind share in the sales force, I have to admit that’s a bit of a struggle. If you look at the difference in volumes and what our sales force is looking at, we’ve done some things around that and we have some focused people in the field who’ve done a number of communications lately to the entire sales force. We’ve got our Product Line Sales Managers in the Americas Marketing Center and we’re trying to beef up their efforts even more.

A lot of our sales are through the channel, and we’re looking at doing even more with resellers. I like the idea of a sales tool that will help position the benefits of the 3000 versus the benefits of the 9000 — to help sales people recognize easily the type of situations where the 3000 would be best suited.

We’re trying to create a new image for the HP 3000, to turn our advertising campaigns around, turn our slogan around. It really does position us as a cool, hot box. It has all the technologies wrapped around it to serve your needs today. My awareness marketing budget has increased over last year, and last year was a tremendous increase from the prior year.

Pam Bennett: When we were looking at the next generation of the HP 3000s with [the] Roseville [manufacturing group], they said it’s not very hard to change the color of the front panel. I would be interested in feedback if the front panel color was totally different for the next generation platforms.

Dave Wilde: One of the things that’s been happening over the last five years is focusing around a set of people who are much more 3000-centric. Ten years ago we had a lot of HP sales reps selling HP 3000 a little bit. Through the channel and the Product Line Sales Managers who report to CSY, we have some people who are very focused on the 3000. We found that to be a much more successful model.

Another example of a program we’ve got is to get HP 3000s into universities and colleges, so they can start teaching students. I know a lot of you have issues with hiring people out of school that have HP 3000 knowledge. Everybody up and down the [panel] has been active in working with our other HP divisions to make sure our storage divisions and our platform division are all knowledgeable about the 3000. There’s been a huge shift there. We have a very active project right now with the storage folks for AutoRAID.