The exodus of HP’s 3000 talent to other parts of the company continues this year, and more evidence surfaced during the recent Linux World conference in New York. At that meeting HP announced a “carrier-grade” version of the Linux operating environment, one designed for servers which need mission-critical reliability. The HP spokesman who carried details to the press was none other than Dave Snow, known to thousands of HP 3000 customers as the Platform Planning Manager for the HP 3000. Snow was a fixture at HP World conferences over the past five years, also serving on the scene of all the new HP 3000 hardware announcements over that period. The long-time veteran of the CSY marketing department, has gone on to new duties for a new telecom group at HP associated with the new version of Linux.

“With the November 14th announcement, CSY will largely be taking to market in the next two years products that we had already planned for,” Snow said. “Since there are no new HP e3000 hardware products after November 1, 2003, there would have been less and less need for my services.” Snow will be sorely missed here at the NewsWire offices and perhaps in the 3000 community as well. He gave illuminating talks on the 3000’s future hardware prospects at HP World, communication we could count on to provide technical details, insights and specifications which sparked our articles and educated system managers in a way that most HP marketing does not. We’re watching to see if other CSY gems make the move to HP’s Linux efforts, and whether that might indicate a preference for a replacement operating environment.