The President of HP’s customer-facing organization said in an exclusive interview at HP World that MPE/iX continues to be important to HP — but she doesn’t foresee expanding the role of the platform in the company’s multiple operating system strategy.

Just after her keynote speech, Ann Livermore answered a few pointed questions about the strategy that her Business Customer Organization outlined with the IT trade press this summer. The executive who reports directly to CEO Carly Fiorina said that the 3000’s strategic value to HP is great, but she does not feel the focused successes the platform achieves today can let it regain its multipurpose role of the past.

Livermore pointed out that Duane Zitzner, President of the company’s Computing Systems Organization, “makes all the decisions about investment resource trade-offs.” (See our Q&A with Zitzner for his views on the 3000’s role in the company.) But in just a few minutes of access to Livermore, the NewsWire heard Livermore put the HP 3000 in a stable place in the current Hewlett-Packard strategy: any platform, any brand, any time.

Is there a possibility the 3000 will become as strategic in HP’s plans as the other operating environments which HP talks about?

The HP 3000 for us continues to be an important operating environment. But our sales seem to be focused in particular vertical industries, areas where people want complete, end-to-end applications. It’s not as big, and we don’t anticipate the revenue stream will be as big for us, as what we see with our HP-UX business, and what we see with our NT business. But it’s going to be continue to be important for us. The revenue generation is not as large, and the new customers are not as large.

It is, on the one hand, very much an installed base market for us. We’re continuing to help our installed base customers expand and add more to their environments: bring additional systems in as they need them and continue to do the performance improvements, scalability and architecture work. But we don’t see the same number of new customers moving onto MPE/iX as we see for HP-UX and with Linux.

We think a lot of this has to do with the fact that there’s more applications available on NT and on Unix today than are available on MPE/iX. We love this operating environment, the reliability. We love the stability. Our limitation has mostly been how many software companies are committed to porting their applications, tuning them and having them run on MPE/iX. That’s the thing that’s driving how broad our business can be.

There’s no HP corporate directive to drive the development of e-speak on the 3000. Is this platform strategic enough to warrant this kind of development from inside HP?

It is. E-speak is agnostic to the operating environment. It will work equally well for an MPE-based environment, a Novell environment, a Solaris environment or an AS/400 environment. We see a number of application service providers who want to use the HP 3000 as the engine, because it’s so reliable. Some of the application companies that are really focused on the HP 3000 environment are looking at selling their application as a service over the net. They have a stable operating environment that’s going to give a whole new generation of activities for ASP-type services — that are powered by the HP e3000.

So it’s a priority to get e-speak on the 3000, to make it an equal player with other HP platforms?

We are as focused on e-speak for HP 3000 type implementations as for any other operating environment. It certainly fits into the strategy.

Some channel partners and customers are concerned there isn’t enough corporate mention of the 3000 in places other than an installed base event like this one. Is there a commitment from your level to change that?

One of the things we realized when we were talking about our multi-OS strategy is that we were focusing most of our discussion around NT, Linux and Unix. But in fact when we look at our business, we have a lot of MPE/iX business — and Novell with Netware. What you’ll see now is HP positioning all five of those operating environments as making up our multi-OS strategy.

Some customers want specific product mentions in HP advertising. I know there’s been a moratorium on that kind of message for the last year. Can they expect specific 3000 messages in ads?