HP expands its reach for 3000 solutions

New Software Partner Team goes beyond verticals to rejuvenate long-time application providers

Market research at the HP 3000 division (CSY) this year has led to a reunion between 3000 application providers and Hewlett-Packard, as CSY takes steps to dance with those that brought them to businesses.

A research team that was first hired to locate a few new vertical markets ripe for 3000 opportunity found untapped gold — “dozens of application providers,” still supporting MPE/iX solutions, said CSY R&D Manager Winston Prather.

Prather said HP is acknowledging that its relationships with these companies, some very large and others very small, fell into disrepair in the 1990s. Now the division has a new mission that’s really an old one: To bring technical consulting and marketing assistance to companies still making MPE/iX software which can provide business solutions.

The change in strategy does not drop the focused vertical market plan that CSY has pursued for more than two years. Instead, the new plan acknowledges the greater role that application providers outside of the “key verticals” are playing in the 3000 renaissance. Prather said he believes companies outside of the Big Five markets — airlines, credit unions, healthcare, direct marketing and manufacturing — are selling at least as many HP 3000s as companies inside those targeted markets.

“We just don’t want to limit ourselves to those markets anymore,” Prather said. “The truth is that we sell the HP 3000 as a multipurpose computer all the time.”

The division has named Narinder Sandhu, the former head of the CSY Escalation Team, as head of a new Software Partner Solutions Team. Solution Teams are CSY’s organizational means to accomplish goals on behalf of customers, teams ranging from Internet and Interoperability to Application Development.

Sandhu’s team is stocked equally with marketing and technical staff members and has contacted more than 100 companies since late May, largely in North America. The effort has been focused in North America because HP believes its European HP 3000 customer base is already enjoying a wider range of applications, Prather said.

The companies CSY has contacted are already trained in HP 3000 development and selling HP 3000 solutions, so no porting is required. Perhaps most importantly, CSY doesn’t have to sell them on the merits of the HP 3000.

“Many of these companies concluded that HP didn’t want to work with them, so they felt more on their own,” Prather said. “That’s what we’re trying to fix. There are more 3000 software vendors out there than many people may have thought. Working together, they’ll be more successful, and that will make us more successful.

“There are a lot of ISVs out there that wish HP had been providing more support for them, but even without that they’re being successful,” Prather said. HP doesn’t think of such companies as die-hards, he said. “There are a lot of ISVs that have been very committed to the 3000 for a long time. We need to be out there helping them.”

Prather said HP is extending technical consulting resources to help companies ready their products for the Web, or interoperate better with middleware and modern interfaces. On the other side of the project, CSY will be providing marketing assistance — in the form of customer lists and cooperative marketing efforts and vertical market advertising, for example — to help companies expand their customer base.

Just as CSY Marketing Manager Christine Martino reported in the NewsWire’s April Q&A interview, Prather said HP isn’t going out to recruit new ISVs. “There are dozens of them out there now that can use extra attention,” he said. “In talking to the ISVs, the reaction has been positive: ‘Hallelujah! We’re really glad to have some help.’ ”

Prather said some of the ISVs contacted are “bandwidth-limited on installations: they have all the business they can take right now, but we see there’s more out there for them. We’re looking at how we can help them increase their installations.”