High-flying Europe party touts 3000's 25th birthday

Pulsing, packed disco show gives hundreds chance to celebrate HP 3000 birthday

The European arm of the HP 3000 division is top-heavy in marketing and business development staff, so the party at the neon-festooned Stuttgart night spot became the focus of CSY's message in the months leading up to the Sept. 24 affair. Ivica Juresa, the Regional Business Manager for CSY Europe, said the lavish blowout was designed to draw attention to the HP 3000 from inside Hewlett-Packard as well as from the customer base.

"The whole idea of this party was not the party itself," Juresa said, "it was all the noise we could make about it all year before it, and what we can say afterward to tell how great it was. Even if it wouldn't have been successful, just talking about it was our marketing instrument for this year. It got great attention inside of HP -- our management was talking so much about the 3000 since we had this party, it's unbelievable. If we were just to advertise, we wouldn't get that attention inside HP."

The success was never in question through the night, and attention from outside HP was also easy to draw with the dazzling outlay. Attracting customers from as far away as Saudi Arabia and as nearby as Southwest Germany, CSY Europe laid out a menu of foods from Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. King prawn tortillas, vegetable quiche, freshly-cut Bunder ham with cornichons, stuffed cucumbers with soft cheese and shrimps, salmon poached whole with dill-mustard dressing and apple strudel with vanilla sauce were just the highlights of the ample buffet. No fewer than five open bars roared all night long with champagne, cocktails and local beers, and every partygoer was handed a flask of fruit-flavored Cyber liquor as they stepped into the club.

A laser-lit hallway, the Timewalk HP 3000, led customers directly to a virtual reality Pacman game anyone could play for free. Once the crowds were assembled and well fed, the Soundblaster auditorium heated up "Disco Inferno" and performances of 70's line-dancing, break-dancing, and a song from the musical "Starlight Express" performed on roller skates.

HP supplied music born in the same period as the HP 3000 for the affair. When the members of the music group "Cologne Syndicate" took the stage after 10 PM, the band's saxophone player rode into the Soundblaster on a motor-driven chair suspended from the club's neon-lit ceiling, wailing high-energy notes. The sax man roved through the crowd to deliver solos before taking the stage.

Dancers soon drew partygoers onto the floor to shift from performance to a dance party. Within minutes the pounding sounds were wailing around much of the CSY managers, outfitted with special denim shirts for the evening with day-glow "HP 3000 TEAM" lettering. General manager Harry Sterling and worldwide CSY marketing manager Roy Bleslawski joined the customers and European staff on the floor, along with former marketing manager Cathy Fitzgerald.

Spinning mirror balls and mother-ship rotating strobe lights played through dry-ice fog as the crowd surged for several hours. After midnight, a limbo dancer carried torches under a bar less than one foot off the ground. "It shows that HP isn't going to leave us 3000 customers in limbo," one partygoer quipped. The last revelers left well past 3 AM.

Juresa said the event was a celebration of the same kind of durability and resurgence the customer base has shown over the quarter century. A Technology Forum held during the day before the party delivered news of the latest HP 3000 advances to the European community, and a German user group 3000 solutions meeting in Stuttgart the next day gave customers who had recovered from the revels a look at third-party offerings for MPE/iX.

"For the HP 3000 community it was great to see how many people are still in the community," Juresa said. "Having these large numbers of people together for the forum and the party gives us confidence that we're not the one lonely indian who's left. It's still a huge community, and letting customers see that is one of the achievements of the party."

Copyright 1997, The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved.