Harry's personal letter to customers

Commercial Systems Division (CSY) General Manager Harry Sterling has announced his retirement from HP, effective by the start of December — and his recommended successor Winston Prather has been named to take his place immediately at the head of the HP 3000 group.

Sterling, whose term as 3000 GM was among the longest in division history, advised Business Critical Computing GM Janiece Chaffin to select CSY’s R&D chief Prather as his replacement. As a result of the change, the 3000 division will regain a general manager dedicated full time to the business needs of the platform.

Sterling said he chose to retire now for personal reasons, and noted that his decision is good timing for the Business Intelligence and Technical Software operations he has led — in addition to the 3000 duties — since May.

“They are now in a phase of their evolution that before we get involved in some of their new strategic alliances, it’s a good transition time for someone else to take that over,” Sterling said. “Otherwise, I would have had to commit for another couple of years.”

The general manager who served almost four years at the head of the 3000 business said he’d set a retirement goal of age 60 for himself, and his announcement brings him in a year earlier than his goal. “I thought it would be really great to start the new millennium retired,” he joked.

Sterling said he planned to spend his upcoming free time “building myself a new PC, since the one I have is three years old.” Prather immediately quipped, “We’re going to have to make that a 3000, Harry.” Sterling also said he’d be spending the spring in his vacation home in New Orleans, and plans to vacation in either Italy or Australia in the fall. His advice for Prather: “Start thinking about how you’ll start using all those frequent flyer miles."

Prather, as leader of HP’s engineering efforts for the 3000, assumes his new duties from the same post that Sterling held in 1995 when taking the GM job. “My calendar’s already filling up, from a travel point of view,” he said.

He also takes over policies and strategy which he’s had a hand in shaping since early last year.

Prather has been on the division’s business council from its inception in 1998, a group of managers from Sterling’s staff and other HP managers who “refine strategies and drive execution for the business,” Prather said. The R&D chief has been spokesman for the division this year in matters such as the used broker crackdown and vertical market alliances. “We’ve always felt very empowered from Harry to really manage the business from that team,” Prather said.

“If I say something needs to change now, that’s pretty ridiculous,” he added, “because I’ve been a part of putting our plans in place. We’re just going to keep running in the direction we’ve been going.”

Prather said he sees his challenges in taking over the 3000 business as leveraging the community spirit that has been rejuvenated in the last few years.

“We have such an incredible installed base of customers, and an incredible team in CSY,” Prather said. “The challenge is how do we continue to take advantage of the entire HP 3000 community to meet customer needs as we move into the future.”

Sterling oversaw the renaissance of the HP 3000 as a strategic business choice in HP, a rebound in sales, the rise of apps-on-tap and the acquisition of Open Skies, a new source for authorized used 3000s, and tech advances such as Internet support, Java capability and the rejuvenation of the 3000 toward IA-64 systems.

Like Sterling before him, Prather will hold R&D and GM posts simultaneously for “next couple of months,” as he evaluates choices for his technical replacement inside CSY.

Sterling will hold duties for a few months as head of the HP Business Intelligence (data warehousing) unit, as well as leadership of the technical software solutions group. Those will be dealt to other HP managers — to give Prather room to focus on his new 3000 duties.

Prather said he was “really excited” about the prospect of getting to manage the 3000 business full-time, instead of having a mixed plate of duties including the 3000 as Sterling did.

“HP’s really recognizing the value of the multiple businesses in providing a general manager for the 3000 business, completely focused on that,” Prather said. “Over the past year it’s been a good thing having Harry plugged into other parts of the organization to leverage our message across the Unix message. It will also be really good that we get a full-time GM.”

The 3000 group will retain the influence it earned while Sterling was doing those other duties, he said, because the 3000 GM is now a member of Chaffin’s staff. Prather will be attending the first staff meeting in the week of Sept. 13, while Sterling travels to HP’s Indian operations. The consistency of being plugged into all of HP’s server issues will be important to the 3000, Prather said.