Spreading 3000 expertise on tail slices
April 9, 2008
As the HP 3000 community huddles together in numbers, the skills and solutions they need become more unique. Migration proponents might call HP 3000 homestead services arcane or obtuse knowledge, but 3000 community members still need to be served from what's known as The Long Tail.
The great thing about Long Tail economics is that small companies can have a big impact on a customer's success using the strategy. The Long Tail, according to Wikipedia, is
The niche strategy of certain business such as Amazon.com or Netflix. The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or "non-hit" items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail.
Doing just a little volume of hard-to-find items like HP 3000 management and data services looks like the new strategy from an old 3000 partner, The Support Group. The company has made its bones on being among the top Trusted Advisors for ERP strategy and MANMAN support. But TSG's recent posting to a the 3000 community Internet newsgroups sketched out solutions which might have become hard-to-find.
While Netflix and Amazon, being public-traded companies, are a long way from small providers, they do offer things you can't get in many places. So do many 3000 community providers. And so community members saw the list of services and solutions TSG (which likes to call itself tSGi, for the the Support Group, inc.) is putting out there; a subset of tSGi's list are slices of the long tail:
HP 3000/MPE Support – tSGi can provide management of your HP 3000 remotely or hosted at our datacenter in Austin, TX
Combined MANMAN and HP 3000 MPE – Complete end to end proactive management of MANMAN and HP 3000 processes and jobs
HP 3000 Disaster Recovery – tSGi provides emergency backup HP 3000 hardware in our Austin datacenter
ERP Applications – tSGi works with a number of ERP vendors to bring the right solutions to our MANMAN customers
Data Cleansing – Whether you are staying on MANMAN or migrating to a new ERP application, clean data is vital to running a successful business
Data Migration – tSGi has done data migrations for numerous MANMAN sites to many different ERP applications. Our data migration knowledge greatly reduces the migration timeline and data errors that can occur without our deep knowledge of MANMAN and IMAGE data relationships
Archive and History Support - for companies that have migrated off of the HP3000 but need to keep the HP 3000 data available, tSGi will keep your HP 3000 in our datacenter at the ready for user access or authorized outside entities, such as auditors
The size of the 3000 community makes a lot of its needs, both migration- and homestead-related, Long Tail servings. That's why a company need not be large to deliver great benefits to a 3000 owner.