HP hosted a mighty road tour over the months that followed the vendor's Technology Forum this fall, spurred on by the Montecito class of Itanium chips driving the newest Integrity servers. But only 50 to 100 customers per city got to see the most current story about the company's alternatives to the HP 3000. We watched in San Antonio and took close notes on virtualization, which we'll share tomorrow. For the first time in four years, the Adaptive Enterprise seems to make better sense for a growing IT shop.

There are easier bits to assimilate from these presentations — especially for the 3000 manager who's used to looking at upgrades from a hardware perspective.  After all, HP's Dave Snow — who used to trot out the newest hardware from the 3000 line at user conferences — gave one of his classic "feeds and speeds" talks about the new honking hardware in the 3600 and 6600 models of Integrity.

PDF files of the slide shows are available online now from HP. Each slide set, Virtualization and Hardware, has good details about the landing strip for the customer now in flight from the HP 3000s which have served them for so many years.

HP has sent off e-mails to invite the interested 3000 customers who didn't attend the road show. Come on, they say, at least download the slides and have a look. The links open up PDF files in a Web browser so configured. Or you can right-click on the HP landing page and same these massive files to a desktop or elsewhere on your computer.