December 1999

One measure of the health of the 3000 community may be in the number of meetings it’s generating. There are twice as many HP 3000 events to attend this February, now that the annual Special Interest Group (SIG) conference is being held right after the 3000’s first-ever all-training conference. The new HP 3000 Solutions Symposium is hosted by Interex, led by volunteers from the MPE Forum, and on Feb. 9 will include training from HP engineers and commercial developers. It will be followed in the very next week by a summit of the SIGs formerly known as IPROF. And if you expected to see CSY prioritizing between these two meetings, well, you’re not thinking big enough. The 3000 division is solidly behind both, since they serve two separate missions, both essential.

We asked the HP 3000 Division’s General Manager Winston Prather how CSY would be backing each of these meetings. “I really think there’s room for both, because they’re separate audiences,” he said. “I was one of the people pushing for the Solution Symposium, because of things like awareness, of wanting to get the word out about what you can do with the HP 3000. When I travel around and talk with customers, I hear ‘I’m thinking about implementing a Unix or NT solution to do that,’ and I ask why they aren’t doing that on the 3000. They say, ‘Because you can’t.” And I tell them yes you can."

“The awareness of what you can do to interact with the Internet, the HP 3000 and e-commerce is not out there,” Prather said. “I’ve been really pushing at Interex, saying that IPROF is focused at a very small audience. It’s a very technical community, and the value that HP gets there is we get to test ideas and prioritize ideas. But I really think there’s a need for a Solutions Symposium, more of a training and education how-to type of symposium” Prather said the division would have some announcements about the platform at the Symposium, though he wasn’t sure what they would be.

The fact that the summit meeting of SIG leaders happens just a few days after the symposium is no barrier to the division’s participation in both events. “We’re supportive of both of them, I think they’re both great.” Prather said. “They have very different audiences and very different value propositions. The Solution Symposium is really targeted at where a lot of the growth of the 3000 is coming from: the end-users who really need to know how to use things. All of the new customers from [vendors] like Smith-Gardner are looking for a how-to thing. Even the installed base people are looking at “how do I Internet, how do I Web-ify, how to I take advantage of all this functionality.’ The SIGs, which are the techie-guru folks, are really interested in ‘how does it work?’ To take large files on MPE as an example, at the Solutions Symposium they’ll be interested in how they can take advantage of them. In the SIG group, they’re interested in how we implemented it, how does it work, and giving us feedback on what’s the next thing we ought to do.”

So if you’re keeping track of meeting opportunities in February, it’s four days of training at Solution Symposium Feb. 9-12 at the Wyndham Hotel, San Jose, Calif. Cost is $595, and you can register through Interex . The SIGs will have their summit meeting with HP on Feb. 15-17 at the Sunnyvale Hilton. Registration details were unavailable as we went to press.