HP’s World shows smaller 3000 presence

Conference carries news, but to fewer MPE users

The latest meeting of HP users in North America featured much to take in: Photo opportunities with a 21-year-old female Indy-class race car driver on the show floor. IBM employees handing xSeries party invitations to HP World attendees as they stepped off conference buses. 800 HP employees swelling the conference for product training. More than 600 meetings, seminars and keynotes spread across five days of a conference that sprawled through two-thirds of the vast Georgia World Congress Center.

An entertaining show floor in Atlanta included ROC’s Software’s climbing wall, here scaled by Marcus Piazolla

About the only thing in short supply at HP World were HP 3000 customers, either migrating or those homesteading. Despite putting up more than three dozen talks aimed at the MPE-using customer, no HP 3000 meeting room could muster more than 50 bodies during the show.

Interex officials proclaimed the conference a success, pointing to a total,unaudited attendance of 8,400 and 571 attendees with HP 3000 interests. The widely divergent numbers of 3000 session attendance and the Interex reports pointed to an MPE crowd which may have appeared mostly on the Expo floor and in free HP keynotes like those from Services chief Ann Livermore and CEO Carly Fiorina.

Fiorina’s keynote was the only one to fill the 2,500-seat hall where it took place. For the most part, reports from vendors and volunteers told of a show with far fewer HP 3000 faces than any in memory.

One vendor who serves the 3000 community said from their booth on the show’s front row that they’d gathered 170 customer leads on the first day, but saw contacts dip to 76 on the second day. Session rooms for MPE-focused events often had fewer than 20 in attendance, a fact easily confirmed by a slick attendance system installed outside each room. Interex executive director Ron Evans said the group will switch back to its own registration system for next year’s show, since attendance breakdowns were still unavailable to Interex more than a week after the show closed.

HP employees and vendors contributed heavily to the headcount at the show. Numbers of these participants — the elements who carry news and information to attendees — were beefed up this year in the first edition of HP World featuring HP’s own product training. Sessions such as “Head to Head with IBM and Dell: How Proliant Wins” were scattered among less promotional training. Birket Foster, the head of HP Platinum Migration partner MB Foster, said this HP World brought a new element to the headcount.

“We know this was a big training event for 800 HP System Architects who were teaching both end users and the HP folks on the latest from ‘palmtops to Non-Stops’,” Foster said. Volunteer MPE content manager Jerry Fochtman, honored by the user group as a Hall of Fame inductee at the show, added that the 3000 turnout looked lighter than he’d ever seen.

“From my perspective this year is the lowest turn-out of MPE’ers I’ve ever witnessed in 20-plus years,” he said. Although homesteading topics were in short supply among the MPE track, Interex’s Evans said the user group is not favoring migration as a transition option.

“We have no agenda in terms of pushing homesteading or migration as the best alternative,” Evans said. Some MPE experts reported this summer their talks were turned away — with an explanation that Interex expected homesteading 3000 customers might not see as much need for in-person training at HP World.

Migrating customers in session rooms were scarce, too. Five customers attended SIG-Migrate. A Transition Roundtable of three migrating vendors and customers drew about three dozen attendees on the show’s last full day. Only the vendor sitting on the panel, Summit, had completed a transition, having started its march from MPE to HP-UX in 1999.