A one-hour briefing at the Interex HP 3000 Solutions Symposium from R&D manager Dave Wilde set priorities for programming to deliver “customer delight” features often found on system improvement ballots (SIBs) of past years. Before it commits what it calls “less than 25 percent” of its tech resource to such projects which improve the e3000 neighborhood, the division will focus on the essentials for survival.

“Before we can invest in anything discretionary, we have to identify what are those things we consider what we call ‘air and water’,” Wilde said. The head of the labs for the e3000 Commercial Systems Division (CSY), Wilde said CSY understands the SIGs feel disconnected from the HP planning process for the platform. None of the top ten items from last year’s SIB was completed by CSY, as the division worked to roll out a revamp of its 3000 lineup this month. And while HP is better at being proactive about improving the 3000, Wilde said “one of the downsides of that is that the SIGs don’t feel like they have any involvement anymore in what we do. They say, ‘You guys have taken control of the road maps, and we have less involvement in that.’ ” CSY has been discussing the issue with the MPE Forum, a group of customers and vendor partners working through Interex on key e3000 processes. Wilde said “it would be a really good thing to more proactively work together, to open up the roadmaps of the things we’re thinking about, that we could be investing in. We have some discretion in the other areas; help us prioritize these.”

Forum members at the Symposium and the SIG3000 meetings were discussing ways to bring the SIB process up to date, to make the to-do list more relevant and closer to what resources HP has in store for the platform. “We’ve started to put together some plans to structure something like that,” Wilde said. “Especially in areas like database application development, Internet capabilities, system management, [we can] work more closely with the Interex and SIG community to come up with a short list of things that we could do. Then we try to find the things that would be of the highest value to the broadest membership of the Interex community.”

That kind of selection process has been the goal of the SIB, but participation in the balloting has been more limited than HP would like to see. Jeff Vance, a CSY engineer with a long list of customer-requested MPE/iX enhancements to his credit, is leading HP’s effort, “taking some initial steps to drive that forward,” Wilde said. “Hopefully you’ll see, over the coming weeks, months and years, a renewed process that works for both the Interex/SIG community and for CSY.”

HP wants the process to identify in the most efficient way “a modest set of enhancements that we could deliver in a timely manner,” Wilde said. HP will set its highest priority on core functionality projects, those involving rolling e3000 disk and tape solutions to be consistent with HP’s storage roadmap; to stay in step with HP’s networking card rollouts; and to keep up with the company’s processor roadmap.