HP bent the results from an Interex Web survey to its liking during the recent e3000 Solutions Symposium, then offered up a few more incentives to a group it called “the majority of customers” migrating away from the 3000. A six-month free loan of an HP-UX system in exchange for a contracted promise to migrate, three months of free support out of a three-year HP-UX service contract, and 12 months of free interest on a multi-year HP 9000 lease were the most tangible incentives. There’s also a half-off sale on the cost of the HP-UX licenses which most people will need to buy, the mission-critical and enterprise-grade licenses you won’t get for free when you convert an A-Class or N-Class HP 3000 to a 9000. At the conference, HP stayed mum about what it will do for the big chunk of its customers not going anyplace anytime soon, saying it is too busy servicing the needs of customers who are planning to migrate.

Whether those migration candidates will end up on HP’s hardware remained to be seen. Of the many migration-bound customers at the conference — the show was propped up with heavily-attended migration sessions — those willing to make a move to Unix said HP could get their business. But those sites moving to Linux, Windows NT or other choices showed no enthusiasm about buying HP’s systems during their migration. Several cited poor experiences with HP’s current Intel offerings, as well as pointing out that Dell appeared to be more responsive than HP in servicing PC server needs. Several representatives from both Sun Microsystems and IBM were afoot in the crowd of 200 customers, hearing the dismay over HP’s choice to exit the 3000 business.

Meanwhile, HP was doing its best to spin the results of the Interex survey to claim that few customers would remain in the 3000 market. HP was given an edge, summarizing results unavailable to the public during the show. Interex released the numbers on the Monday after the show closed, and the raw results paint a different picture. The majority of the 582 respondents — replies were anonymous — said they were dissatisfied with HP’s migration plans and offerings; only 10 percent said they were satisfied. And fully two-thirds of all customers surveyed were interested or somewhat interested in the OpenMPE movement to extend the life of their 3000 platform beyond HP’s plans. HP gave this OpenMPE option about 10 seconds of airtime in its three hours of presentations to the attendees. The largest group of customers, some 42 percent, also said they were dissatisfied with HP’s willingness to investigate the OpenMPE potential on their behalf. Instead of offering a message for these customers at the Symposium, HP chose to state that 77 percent of those polled were either “planning a migration, or already migrating.” Raw numbers showed more than 50 percent out of the 77 percent are only in initial planning stages, and headed for a “transition,” not a migration. The poll showed the majority of those heading away from the 3000 say they’ll do the work with in-house staff (58 percent) and are likely to replace applications rather than migrate code.