HP is planning to proceed with its Customer Funded Enhancement (CFE) operations, improvements to the HP 3000 funded from the Software Support Division of HP. All it has to do is keep the project on track through management changes in both the support division and the HP 3000 Division (CSY) labs.

“People aren’t aware that we had a lot of management changes inside our division that caused some different questions,” said SSD’s Sue Bennett, CFE product manager and liaison between the support group and CSY. “We’re going back and revisiting with CSY, which also had some management changes. We’re sort of reinventing the wheel.”

The CFE project was committed to last year with one set of managers at the two divisions. Now management has shifted in both groups, and managers needed to revisit the commitments, Bennett said.

Bennett wasn’t ready to identify the formal commitment that SSD had established for CFE as of early January. Milestones and deadlines still had to be set in January meeting between the divisions to check on the progress of JINFO, the first enhancement to be delivered under the CFE banner. (See “HP support floats pilot enhancement project,” January 3000 NewsWire).

JINFO will allow programmers to easily test whether a job exists, and then determine its state, spoolfile and CI pin number. But the primary focus for the JINFO enhancement was supposed to be a way “to test the waters” and establish a process for delivering enhancements through the CFE. Bennett said that one goal of JINFO wasn’t going to be met.

“What we’re finding is that JINFO is not really a test of our process,” Bennett said, “because we’re doing it internally rather than externally, as we were perhaps looking at doing some of the enhancements.” HP assigned engineering resources from inside the 3000 labs to build JINFO.

Bennett said that JINFO was chosen as the first CFE project because it could be completed quickly, and HP is conscious the clock is ticking on customer expectations.

“Customers have been waiting for quite some time now,” she said. “This was a quick turnaround.”

Changes to the prospective list of enhancements have caused a change in the engineering resource. “We originally started when the Interex Advocacy Group came to us with a list of enhancements they had suggested to us to look at,” Bennett said. “Now that we look at where we are today, that list is different. It’s something that [CSY’s] Jeff Vance has gone out and pulled from the user community. They re-opened the potential list.”

When asked specifically if SSD would be paying for MPE enhancements, she replied, “I think the question is whether enhancements are getting done, regardless of who’s paying for them.

“We’re doing JINFO, and it will be announced at IPROF,” Bennett said. “We’ll be looking at alternatives for enhancements.” She added that JINFO probably won’t be released as a patch for the 5.5 version of MPE/iX, but only for MPE/iX 6.0, “probably because 6.0 is Year 2000-compliant.” HP has certified MPE/iX 5.5 PowerPatch 6 as Year 2000-compliant, too. The next CFE project will also be announced at the IPROF conference, Feb. 18-20.

CFE is important because it represents a new source for the 3000 customer base’s engineering resources that deliver more HP 3000 enhancements. Last August at the HP World Conference, CSY lab officials said that the CFE project “will be supporting more of the items that come out of customer delight or SIG list items — that might help replace some of our resources that have been shifted to more long-term items.”

The original list of enhancements provided for CFE included some potential to do the engineering outside of CSY, “because that’s where the code was,” Bennett said. The new list, solicited in the fall, puts most of the code squarely inside CSY’s labs. “Looking at the [requested enhancement list] right now, it’s all coming out of CSY,” Bennett said.

Bennett said that the MPE Forum would continue to make decisions about how the project moves forward, in conjunction with SSD and CSY at HP. The Forum is an Interex entity managed by Tony Furnivall and Leslie Virgilio, Interex volunteers and former Special Interest Group leaders.

The CFE work may ultimately be done by third-party programming firms, such as those that CSY is currently using for some of its MPE/iX engineering. “Where CSY chooses to go [for the engineering] is up to CSY,” Bennett said. “That’s part of the process that we’re testing out.”