Sad.One of the first press interviews I ever did was for the HP World magazine. And HP World and the old InterWorks were my introductions to the bizarre world of conference speaking.
Ever since Lew Platt retired, HP never really seemed to engage satisfactorily with Interex. Sure, there was plenty of rank-and-file support, but HP didn't seem to see much strategic value in having an independent advocacy group.
Worse, Interex and Encompass (the old DEC/Compaq user group) never really got along.
I don't expect the HP-run conference to be quote the same, somehow.
Tags: Interex, HP World, HP, HPQ.
5 comments:
Thanks for offering a deeper. perspective on the relationship between Interex and the other entities. Although I've worked with companies that resold several types of HP computers (at one point our division was reselling Windows PCs, Tandem NonStop, and Tru64 UNIX boxes), I've never really gotten involved in the user group aspect of it.
The "marketing free" gimmick still gets to me...
The marketing free gimmick came from the Interex Marketing Department. For the last 7 months the HPWorld 2005 Program Committee have been very diigent when screening the the 450 submissions to the conference program to insure there was no marketing fluff in the program, just solid technical presentations. This is an extremely difficult task since the bottom line for a vendor of anything is to market some product or service. The team of 25 or so highly skilled and qualified leaders of the IT industry and prominant HP personel did a fantastic job creating a program from leading HP customers and from HP themselves even under an imposed quota of 20 HP papers. The HPWorld 2005 program was one of the best we had ever seen in the 10 years of HPWorld's and covered all aspects of Enterprise computing from storage, a miriad of OS's, security, networking, IT management etc etc.
In fact you will find most of the same presenters appearing at the Techforum (at least the HP presenters) but you won't find all the valuable customer input and success stories.
All of that was a culture developed over 31 years of users experiences which will now be lost to a more sanitized sales event in New Orleans.
My first job in 1978 was for a Sunnyvale timesharing company that ran a HP-3000 Series I. Intel and Rolm ran their financial systems on our machine. The last INTEREX HP-World I attended was the San Francisco blow-out with Circe d' Soliel. Interex promoted HP products until around 1994 when HP pulled it's salesforce and subsequently anounced the end FIRST end of the HP-3000. With UNIX HP-UX dominating marketing and sales, as a Interex Regional Users Group officer we immediately saw a drop in attendance at the local level. So many IT shops were losing the HP-3000 only mantle and becoming multi-vendor/OS shops. Windows, NT, Unix, HP-UX. The family HP way was gone and then Carly placed the final stake in the HP-3000 and Interex about 3 years ago. What is HURD's golden handshake compensation? Only the CEO and board members get richer. The rest of struggle to live and have a sense of unity. It is no longer an HPWorld.
I was one of those HP customers planning on doing a session on Sarbane-Oxly and an HP3000 Client/Server application. My place of business okayed the conferance bases that I was only having OCS costs, because I was doing a breakout. HP should have at least looked at the speakers and the non-vendor speakers could have been offered a pass to the HP tech conferance. Would have made a handfull of people happy, but they just responded blankly when asked about it. Too bad, has really made me wonder about HP and my loyalty to them.
It's very sad. First Interex goes into receivership, HPWorld is cancelled, everyone is funneled into the HP TechForum scheduled for 2 weeks from now in New Orleans. I doubt very much with the news today there will be an HP centric conference at all this year.
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