3000 keynote stresses projects in play

Prather honors partners, promises new platform developments

The leader of the HP e3000 division told customers and partners at HP World how special they were, stressing the projects in play for the platform and delivering advice about tough times.

“It’s been a really tough year,” said Winston Prather, general manager of the e3000 division (CSY) during his keynote speech. “When times are tough, you need to think about what it takes to be successful, and who you are working with to be successful.”

The comment pointed to the HP channel partners in the 3000 community, who Prather invited up at the end of his speech for recognition by the crowd. “The HP 3000 community is really something special, if you look at the partnerships and technologies they bring.”

Birket Foster, founder of M.B. Foster Associates, received the HP e3000 Contributor’s Award for 2001. “He has a long history with Hewlett-Packard and the HP 3000,” Prather said. “He has lots of energy, and most of the time it’s directed at promoting the HP 3000 within the community.”

Prather also poked a little fun at Foster’s “immense vocabulary of three-letter acronyms. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with him where after five minutes I say, ‘I don’t have any idea what you’ve just said, but I’m sure there’s something I need to know in there.’”

The GM reviewed the CSY product releases of the last six months, but also announced that work has already begun on HP 3000 models using the latest PA-RISC processors. “We’re already working on the PA-8700, so we’ve got performance kickers coming for these new systems,” he said.

Additional peeks into the future include “new storage solutions, and new versions of XP storage drives, and new arrays. We’ve got a lot of that work going on in the lab as well.”

Prather said that HP wants “to see the adoption of [secure Web servers] faster, so with one of the next releases of the operating system we’re going to bundle the secure version of the Web server — and give it away with every system. I’d really like to see more customers using the technology.”

In another segment of his speech, Prather asserted the A-Class e3000s are more of a success than even HP projected. “We project what we’re going to sell, and the A-Class systems are selling at a much higher rate than we anticipated,” he said. “We’ve seen the new systems taking off much faster than we projected, a more rapid switchover.”

Much like his colleague, HP CTO Rich DeMillo, Prather demonstrated a handheld device communicating with an HP server. An HP Jornada PDA was running the new GUI/3000 software in Prather’s hand, providing wireless administration of the server just finishing its 29th year of release at HP.

“This is a perfect example of a challenge to technology providers, to provide a real solution to customers. APIs won’t do it — customers want a more packaged solution available. Technologies like this are what I’m talking about.”