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Software Services Division to fund improvements to MPE/iX software in new alliance

The best news is that CFEs appear to be misnamed, because customers won’t be funding them with additional money.
Sue Bennett, the support organization’s liaison with the HP 3000 division, told HP World attendees that HP is listening to requests for more involvement from SSG in 3000 enhancements.

“Our customers have been asking us for enhancements for some time now,” Bennett told the NewsWire in an interview. “It is being done to meet evolving customer needs.”

The extra resource from the support organization is especially important while the HP 3000 division (CSY) works to bring the HP 3000 and MPE/iX to IA-64 systems. But Bennett said the support division’s decision to become a development partner in the 3000 wasn’t tied strictly to CSY’s IA-64 commitment.

“Actually, the decision was made prior to the announcement of moving the platform to IA-64,” Bennett said.

“As this is a pilot program, we began by investigating what enhancements would give the greatest short-term impact to the HP 3000 platform, so those projects can be tackled first,” Bennett added. “With a long-term focus on IA-64, CFE could be used as a short term solution to take advantage of potential enhancements.”

Development work in the 3000 division (CSY) that enables performance growth is pressing less critical enhancements to the bottom of immediate to-do lists. Support’s funding for selected enhancements will help HP do the everyday tactical work for the 3000 — while CSY funds the strategic growth solutions.

Which enhancements will be funded by support dollars is still being evaluated. “SSD is working closely with CSY, SSD’s Customer Support Business Unit R&D, and Interex,” Bennett said. “The 3000 Newswire will also be a means of us obtaining customer feedback on the enhancements.”

Bennett said her organization wasn’t prepared at presstime “to discuss how long the evaluation and prioritization process will last, what areas the enhancements will focus on, or who will be doing the enhancements.” She said SSD promises to notify the press and customer base when the decisions have been made.

Support has always ensured that 3000 software and hardware remained reliable, and even gotten bug fixes out to the customer base. According to CSY R&D manager Winston Prather and GM Harry Sterling, there’s been a fundamental shift in how support will help 3000 customers with new functionality.

Now some of the funding will come from the support organization, to help pay for CFEs. The CFEs began their life as a 1997 proposal during the IPROF conference, a way to get CSY to do the things it couldn’t make a good business case for but were still on some customers’ wish lists. When HP couldn’t give a green light to a business plan for an enhancement, letting the customer base fund the CSY development through a CFE was supposed to be another way to see daylight.

Prather said there was fundamental resistance inside CSY to making customers pay for such extras, however. With the help of the new support funding, CFEs will be getting more real. “There’s a list beginning to be made of CFEs,” Prather said.

Getting an enhancement designated as a CFE is one more way to pay for product improvements. “It’s another avenue for items that don’t come out of our business planning,” said CSY engineer Pam Bennett. “The CFEs will be supporting more of the items that come out of customer delight or SIG list items, things that might help replace some of our resources that have been shifted to more long-term items.”

“What we didn’t like about it was that we don’t think customers should have to pay additional money [for enhancements],” Prather said. “I didn’t feel good about that. The progress that we’ve made is that the support organization said, ‘You’re right, we’re not asking for more money — and we’re going to fund some of these enhancements.’ ”

“I don’t think people [at HP World] understood the significance,” Prather added. “That’s an agreement we’ve reached with the support organization to selectively fund enhancements, almost like Customer Delight Solutions. CSY is looking out for the long run, the big-ticket items and strategic investments we need to do to make sure the platform moves forward. This is another way to get that kind of thing funded. The support organization has said they will use support dollars to enhance the product.”