HP rejoins 3000 vendors with RTUs
February 12, 2007
HP returned to the ranks of companies which sell products to HP 3000 customers, opening up a Right To Use (RTU) license business aimed at customers upgrading HP 3000s.
The new RTU, the first such license ever offered to HP 3000 sites, will be sold to sites which need to improve the performance of a system which HP has been retreating from for more than five years.
Ross McDonald, the HP e3000 R&D Lab Manager, said the new product is a departure from HP’s designs for the product’s lifespan.
“We’ve been winding down the 3000, so it was not expected that we would do this,” he said. “We’re really doing this to accommodate customers who need to upgrade their systems." HP’s documents which explain the RTU policies are available at the HP Web page www.hp.com/products1/evolution/e3000/products.html
Customers who have been planning and executing migrations, or digging in to homestead their systems without HP’s help in a few years, now see the vendor catering to sites that need more 3000 power now.
The new RTU license only applies to customers who are upgrading their systems; no existing, unmodified 3000s will be affected by the new HP product. HP plans to sell the upgrade licenses for between $4,000 and $89,500, minus a discount for the value of the customer’s existing MPE/iX license.
The value of those discounts will only be available through a call to HP or a contact with an authorized reseller of the RTU. As an example cited during our interview with McDonald and HP R&D project manager Jennie Hou, one such discount is $28,000.
HP has calculated the value of the existing MPE/iX licenses, rather than track the amount a customer paid for MPE/iX when the 3000 was first purchased. That $28,000 discount, for example, comes off the $89,500 RTU list price for the top-end, four-CPU N-Class 750Mhz HP 3000, when upgrading from the 3-CPU 550MHz N-Class server.
McDonald stressed that the prices for the RTU will then be subject to further discounts the customer has established with HP, some 10-20 percent off list price.