HP 3000 division (CSY) general manager Harry Sterling was present at each stop, assisted by a cast of CSY managers including R&D chief Winston Prather, marketing manager Roy Breslawski, Internet R&D manager Alvina Nishimoto, and data center solution manager Rachel Kornblau. Sterling gave a glowing report on the HP 3000’s fiscal year at the tour’s conclusion in Dallas. He also announced the division was hiring for MPE operating system internals development work.

“We want to use our people to work on those core-critical, low-level kinds of investments that need to be made around architectures — changes that we can’t really rely on partners to do,” Sterling said. CSY managers at the Forums said the division is searching for talent to work in the Cupertino, Calif. and Bangalore, India areas, but will discuss working for HP from any location with the right applicants.

HP is donating systems to universities to get 3000s into college curriculums again, Sterling reported at the Forums.

“We know there are needs in developing MPE expertise,” he said. “We have a program in place right now where we are willing to donate 3000s to universities who are willing to teach MPE courses.” He added that CSY has had a number of universities in the US who have done this in the past year and are planning fall courses including MPE.

HP unveils CORBA plans

Nishimoto reported that a groundswell of interest in distributed object technology on the 3000 is leading to the platform’s first CORBA offering. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture would let HP 3000s share computing resources with other systems on a network. Object request broker services would be available to the 3000 through the Netscape FastTrack Web server, but some developers say the runtime Visigenic software in FastTrack wouldn’t be useful.

“The Netscape-embedded ORB is not the answer,” said Duane Percox, a principal at education software supplier Quintessential Software Systems. “There is real concern over its use outside the realm of the server. What we need is a true CORBA-compliant ORB that stands alone on the 3000.”

CSY plans to use Orbix, an ORB from Iona which is being bundled into HP-UX, by porting the software to MPE/iX.

“Iona’s product is by far the most popular product with developers,” Nishimoto said. “Of the 3000 customers who have asked about CORBA, they’re are all using Iona’s Orbix. We’re trying to have some offering in there and move on it pretty quickly. It’s amazing to me how many inquiries we’ve had. We asked about this a year ago and there wasn’t much interest. This year I get constant calls from certain customers. It’s become very clear that we need to have a direction on it.”

HP aims efforts at growth

A road map that outlines a six-times performance improvement for 3000s over the next seven years keeps making appearances in 1998 presentations — and Strategic Customer Forum talks included a copy in customer packets. The details (see chart) show HP will use a mixture of 2.0 compiler technology, multiprocessor scaling, IO enhancements and expanded memory capacity with new hardware to maintain a 30 percent per year performance improvement. Winston Prather, CSY’s R&D leader, told customers a good deal of the advances will be available through software work that’s already begun in the labs.

“A lot of the [advances] are software related,” Prather said. “That’s where a lot of the effort is going on right now within the R&D organization.”

Customers can expect a period of several years where HP will release new 3000s which will use both architectures. “One of the things you’ll see with the transition to IA-64 is at least a three-year overlap,” Prather said. “The boxes that are supported will execute PA-RISC chips, and you’ll be able to get upgrades and stay on PA-RISC. When you’re ready you can swap that board out upgrade the operating system and execute on Intel’s IA-64.”

Prather also commented on HP’s selection of Intel as a partner for its next-generation processor technology. From HP’s perspective, market share was at least as important as technology in teaming up with the chip giant.

“To be a leader in microprocessor performance you need to have technology,” Prather said, “but you also need to have volume. The volume leader is going to end up being the price-performance leader. HP noticed the right partnership was with Intel, and the industry is going to consolidate. The proprietary [RISC] chips [from other vendors] are going to go away over time — not in the next three to five years, but eventually.”

Leaning on third parties

With HP’s own 3000 efforts focused on growing the platform’s performance, Sterling said the company will be leaving many opportunities for software and middleware to its third-party partners.

“Any place that we can use partners or resellers or software tool vendors to develop a total solution for you, that’s what we do,” he said. “We think we get the most leverage that way.” Portions of MPE/iX are already being designed by outside contractors such as those at Allegro Consultants, while M.B. Foster’s ODBCLink was pared down to a subset to provide the ODBC middleware in MPE/iX 5.5 and 6.0.

Sterling added that requests from customers to bring more software under the wing of the Fundamental Operating System (FOS) are going to be scrutinized closely.

“The customers will say they want it to be part of FOS, to be free,” Sterling said of items like printing software and ODBC middleware. “The reality is that we’re all in business to make a buck. So are our resellers, and they’re important to us. I’m not going to do something that puts my business partners out of business in order to give you something free. The other part of that is I don’t want to invest in something that’s already available in another way.”

The general manager didn’t eliminate all hope of having CSY offer software on the HP 3000 that’s already available on another HP platform. Sterling said customers “that have a single server and don’t want to have multiple servers, and typically have a very small IT staff and don’t want to have to manage multiple servers…may be a very good business case to duplicate some of the functionality and bring it to the 3000. We’ve done that with a lot of the middleware technology. But I’m not going to take a major application that runs very effectively on Unix or NT and try to bring it to the 3000 just so it can be on the 3000.

“We just don’t have the resources to do it all,” he said. “Try to look beyond the 3000 to the whole offering from Hewlett-Packard for your solution.”

Plans for Java

Prather outlined HP’s expectations for Java/iX, just shipping to the customer base for the first time in the 6.0 MPE/iX release.

“Just like any other programming language, it has a lot of potential, but a lot of customers are taking a wait-and-see perspective on Java,” Prather said. “We see people writing supplemental apps.”
Prather speculated that payroll applications, for example, will be available in Java for the HP 3000, software “for these non-core applications. Over time there’s no reason why you wouldn’t also see the core applications become Java-based.”

Prather said HP’s plan is to focus on performance for Java in a core subset of features for the language. “You won’t see us chasing Sun on the latest and greatest piece of technology,” he said. “You will see us working with third-party vendors and focusing on performance to make Java actually work.”

Mature business growth

Sterling told customers at the Forums that HP is looking to his division to establish a new business plan for mature technology. CSY began to consult with a published expert in product life cycles during 1997, and the meetings led to a strategy based on the 3000’s longevity.

“The Commercial Systems Division is leading the way for HP in understanding the concepts of a mature business, and how to really work in that model,” Sterling said. “We have a number of HP businesses that have now moved into that segment — Unix for one, and the LaserJet printer business for another.” CSY’s functional staff traveled to LaserJet headquarters in Boise, Idaho to share business plans.

Sterling said the strategy defines emerging markets as very risky, “and also very expensive in terms of start-up costs. There are a lot of technology companies in particular that never take advantage of a mature market. Their technology ages and they go back and start over, rather than really understanding how they can leverage that investment into new opportunities.”

The consultant “has since adjusted his model, and he’s now writing a new book that will be focused on how to invest in mature companies. His theory is that the real opportunities for making money are in the mature markets, not in the emerging markets.”

The strategy helped pave the way for the decision to support IA-64 on the HP 3000. Sterling said he committed to lowering profit margins for the division while it ramped up for the new architecture.

“It did require adjusting some of our financial goals,” he said. “I put together a proposal for Bill Russell [general manager of the Enterprise Server Group] which included reducing our net profit goals for the next three years to reinvest in what we needed to do to get to IA-64. He absolutely agreed, and said it was the right decision.”

Sterling said the risk to the division is in its willingness to share a five-year product plan while changing architectures. Five-year plans in general are a rare thing, he added.

“There are very few vendors who are willing to share with you their five-year hardware plans,” he said. “It’s a little bit risky for us to do this, particularly since we’re rolling our platform. The risk is that when you go through a product roll, it’s a touchy time — there’s a risk the customers will stop buying your current products and wait for the new products. Many vendors won’t give you any visibility into when the new products are coming.”

OpenView and 3000 upgrade

Prather noted that system management options for 3000 administrators haven’t kept pace with products for HP’s other systems. HP 3000 owners who don’t use Unix or NT systems never made the transition to newer OpenView IT Operations Center (ITO) capabilities — because ITO requires HP-UX or NT systems.

“I think we have a deficiency in the product,” Prather said. “We’re working with the OpenView folks to get the OpenView IT Operations Center product to a point where our 3000 customers will think it has the functionality necessary to support their environment as well.” ITO allows customers to do centralized system management and problem resolution for a network of HP systems. CSY’s enhancement objectives for the product would allow all-3000 networks to do single-console management of multiple systems.

AutoRAID en-route

HP explained the benefits of the Legato networked backup solution for customers at the Forums. Prather noted that the software doesn’t need a non-3000 system in the backup loop if sites use both the Legato Client and Storage Node modules. Using the software lets DLT libraries and stacker tape units hang off HP 3000s, backing up other 3000s.

But the Legato configuration update was overshadowed by notice of a new storage technology for 3000 sites, AutoRAID. The HP product that delivers Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks has been available on HP 9000s and NT systems for some time. AutoRAID selects RAID levels by monitoring storage use to optimize performance and maximize efficient use of disk capacity.

It’s the Auto that gives the product an advantage over other RAID products — such as the current 3000 RAID offerings like the Model 10 and Model 20 systems. HP reports that the total cost of ownership for a typical RAID product can be as much as five times the initial price, due to administration and management costs.

HP’s AutoRAID scales up to 1.3 terabytes of raw capacity in a two-meter rack. The systems can use HP’s newest 18.2Gb disk modules, to help drive the total cost of storage to $0.28 per megabyte.

Prather reported that “We need to support HP’s AutoRAID technology, and it will be coming out shortly.” Rachel Kornblau added that the product is expected to be available for 3000s next summer, pending a successful investigation of the technology’s compatibility with MPE/iX.