Pair of HP's 3000 vets retire; Wilde hands reins to Hou
May 2, 2007
A pair of HP engineers, steeped deepest in HP's 3000 development and post-2008 planning, announced they will leave HP at the end of May — the same month that the current e3000 business manager is handing over his reins to another HP 3000 veteran of more than 20 years.
Jeff Vance and Mike Paivinen will accept the Enhanced Early Retirement (EER) offer from HP for 2007, leaving behind decades of work on the HP 3000 and MPE/iX, as well as more than five years of service to a 3000 community in transition. Dave Wilde, who's been the HP 3000 "virtual division" general manager and e3000 business manager since 2002, reports that he's taking a new HP post to work in a vertical industry team that serves HP's Health and Life Sciences business.
While HP cannot replace the resource which Vance, Paivinen and Wilde represented to the 3000 community, the company will be carrying on their work in development, advocacy and management with current 3000 staff. Jennie Hou, a veteran of more than two decades of 3000 experience who's been working as one of the e3000 R&D project managers, takes over for Wilde as business unit manager. Hou was HP's representative at the HP 3000 conference hosted last fall by the Greater Houston RUG, and she spearheaded this spring's announcement of the new Right To Use MPE/iX license.
While Vance has made the five years after HP's exit-the-market announcement bloom with MPE/iX enhancements, marshaling beta test patches into customer hands, Paivinen served as HP's liaison to OpenMPE — keeping the advocacy group updated with HP's long-range plans and current software procedures.
The work of Vance and Paivinen is being passed to several 3000 veterans inside HP, with the public customer liaison duties most particularly passed to Craig Fairchild. "Fairch," as he's been known in the deepest development and lab circles of the 3000 community, is a leading architect on the MPE/iX file system, among other projects — a system which pumps the heart of all HP 3000 software operations. He's one of the most senior HP 3000 engineers still working for the vendor.
Wilde, whose tenure with the 3000 community began in 1986, said that other lab experts, such as Jim Hawkins and Walt McCullough — whose technical expertise and conference presentations have focused on 3000 storage solutions, IO devices and drivers — would also be taking on the duties of the two engineers who are leaving HP. Vance and Paivinen's EER agreements set a departure deadline by the end of May, Wilde added.