A Systems Improvement Ballot will emerge again for the 3000

The annual poll of 3000 customers’ enhancement needs for the system will take place again in 2004, the first year ever that an SIB has been conducted for a system HP no longer sells. Paul Edwards, new OpenMPE board member and chair of the MPE Forum, took nominations for enhancements through the end of January. The requests will become a ballot that all users can vote on, with the results becoming a to-do list for HP’s MPE/iX engineers as long as the vendor employs such technical staff.

HP was trying to encourage the customers to submit real engineering projects for this year’s SIB, rather than the economic incentives that topped last year’s ballot such as un-crippling the N-Class and A-Class servers. The ballot will appear on the Interex user group Web site in February, with results discussed at this year’s Solutions Symposium and HP World Interex conferences.