Commercial Systems Division (CSY) general manager Winston Prather has appointed a successor for the R&D lab manager post he vacated to lead CSY, naming Dave Wilde to lead HP’s 3000 engineering.

Wilde took the post which Prather had been covering since September, 1999, moving up from his position as lab section manager devoted to HP’s platform growth projects and datacenter development. He had served in that capacity since 1998, directing engineers who have been working on delivering the N-Class HP 3000s, expected early next year. Wilde’s lab section has also been developing storage and high availability products for the system.

“Dave has been with CSY for many years and served in many capacities,” Prather said. “He has been a member of the marketing team, lead our consulting team, and more recently was R&D section manager responsible for platforms, storage, high availability, and networking. He has tremendous long standing relationships with many of our largest customers.”

Wilde came to HP in 1984 after graduating with a BS degree from the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana. He started his career with the HP test and measurement group, and moved to the HP database labs in 1986 to work on the Allbase/SQL core. In 1992 Wilde accepted a position in CSY’s product marketing group, where his responsibilities included product management and planning for the HP e3000 product line. In 1995 he returned to the lab, managing a team of consultants responsible for working with major accounts to assist in optimizing their use of the HP e3000.

The new manager said one of the lab’s top goals is efficiency, “doing good planning to plot the right intercept point for where you want to deploy a new technology. You can avoid pitfalls if you can get up high enough to see the dead-ends and not waste time on it.” Wilde also takes on a set of Solution Teams that has evolved into joint US- and Bangalore-based management.

Wilde also noted that making promises on future products for the e3000 would be news released through the CSY marketing function. Lab-based announcements, which have been commonplace from the division, will be as carefully planned as the projects themselves.

“We’re trying to do a more responsible job in the lab of announcing, and making sure we don’t set expectations unrealistically,” Wilde said. “When we’ve talked about things in the past, we’ve said things were going to be available and we missed those deadlines. We put things on a slide and said ‘in this timeframe,’ and people started translating it into a commitment. We’re trying to be a little more responsible about that, so we don’t mislead people and get their expectations up that we can’t deliver on.”