Interex yanked down its curtain just weeks before its moneymaking show

HP users group Interex officially pulled the plug its operations July 18, posting a notice on its home page of its interex.org Web site. “It is with great sadness, that after 31 years, we have found it financially necessary to close the doors at Interex. Unfortunately our publications, newsletters, services and conference (HP World 2005) will be terminated immediately.” After thanking its “100,000 members and volunteers” the notice added, “We dearly wish that we could have continued supporting your needs, but it was unavoidable.

Within 24 hours of posting its farewell letter, the group pulled down every Web page on its site except the letter. The volunteers who’d contributed to the knowledge on the Web site scrambled to retrieve their work for the HP 3000 community. Donna Garverick of the OpenMPE group reported she was working on getting the Contributed Software Library hosted on another Web server.

The user group had struggled to maintain a financial balance in the years following the Y2K ramp-up for IT, according to one of its directors, an era when attendance at the group's annual HP World shows fell steadily. Membership figures for the group, inflated to six figures in press releases during 2004, included a very broad definition of members, according to that director, such as “anyone who'd ever requested an Interex publication.”

Phone calls to the Interex offices went unanswered at the reception desk and unreturned through voicemail in the days following the shut-down notice. Advertiser and HP World sponsor Acucorp had news of the HP World cancellation confirmed by Interex ad rep Tara Stafford, according to Acucorp's Marketing Communications Manager Kendra Brunje. Brunje added that the Interex employee said the Interex staff "was led to the door" on Friday. User conference speakers were also notified of the conference cancellation by e-mail.