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Winston Prather, R&D manager for the HP 3000 Division (CSY), said the work which the new teams do has always been among the division’s objectives. But he said announcing the new groups to cover Effective Sales Channels, HP 3000 Awareness, New Opportunities and Support shows CSY is willing to improve these for its customers.

“These are really important parts of the complete value delivery chain,” Prather said of the new teams. “Customers are saying these are areas that could use some attention. These are definitely not product-specific areas.”

Specific MPE/iX products have been the goal of past Solution Teams, the mechanism which CSY uses to turn its customers’ needs into realities. The teams are made up of engineers, marketing experts and managers, working together to deliver things like networked printing, ODBC software for Windows 95 clients, or better bandwidth. CSY blends business and technical viewpoints – tempered with customer input – in the process.

In addition to the three teams listed above, CSY also has groups dedicated to Education/Consulting/Training, Application Support, Growth, Data Center Management, and Interoperability and Internet. New Opportunities is one place where founding alliances with new application providers for 3000s gets attention, Prather said.

“Their goal is to identify where the best ways are to bring new customers to the HP 3000, and to HP,” Prather said of the New Opportunities team, headed by CSY’s Larry Boyd and Steven Little. New Opportunities would have responsibility to help new application partners – such as manufacturing supplier Baan – know about the value of porting to the HP 3000, Prather added.
New Opportunities will also work to enhance opportunities for focused applications already running on MPE/iX. “If we were to work closer with these third parties, we could make them more successful,” Prather said.

Improvements in the HP 3000 COBOL compiler falls under the charter of the Application Development team, headed by HP database lab manager Jon Bale. Bale’s team works with a number of MPE/iX products which are part of the Roseville Software Services Technology division, Prather explained. But the Application Development team won’t be setting up a “massive infrastructure for porting and recruitment” hardware and software developers.

“The better way to do it is to have the individual Solution Teams work with companies,” Prather said. “We will still be doing things like the equipment pools and the 918DX program, and looking at other potential ideas. But we won’t be creating a huge porting center. For third parties who want to port to the 3000, we can make that happen. I’d much rather put the investment into people, programs and future platforms.”

While 3000 evangelism might rest in New Opportunities, Prather said it’s an objective of every one of the eight teams. “That’s something we all need to do,” he said. “We’re not looking for New Opportunities to provide the evangelism for new sales – they’re the ones doing very focused business plans.” New Opportunities will “do business analysis, where the 3000 can play and which industries it should play in.”

The Sales Channel focuses on “an effective two-tier distribution in the US and multiple distributors in the rest of the world” for HP 3000s, Prather said. Goals for that team would include ensuring distributors have adequate information for customers, and VARs have programs in place “to ensure that the channels are not just order takers, which is unfortunately some of the things we have seen.”

The Interoperability/Internet team has responsibility to bring leading Web and Internet solutions to the HP 3000. This team, headed by Suresh Kumar, Ann Stein and Kriss Rant, will be studying technologies such as the Global System Optimizer portion of Tower Technology Corp.’s Triple Crown technology. The technology that speeds up Java applications was licensed by HP in February, and Prather said the license includes the ability to use it on MPE/iX systems. A supported Domain Name Server for MPE/iX is also under consideration.
Work from the product-related groups will cover MPE/iX releases 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0, Prather said. “We’re trying to stretch out that window of things we’re talking about. Some of the things are planned for longer-term release, not 6.0 and not 7.0.”