This club side of UT's stadium only rose with the 3000

We came together at the UT Club last month. I had lunch at the University of Texas alumni club, deep in the heart of Darryl K. Royal Stadium, to talk with Chad Lester about something older than the football palace's official name: the way that MPE has been sold to the world. 

"Here we are in 2018 sitting at the UT Club, still talking about MPE and how we can go infiltrate those accounts" he said. Some of the reason third parties still find 3000 budget this year is that HP didn't position its business strategy around back-end revenues for the server. HP wanted its money up front. The up-front money meant that by the late 1990s the 3000 division at HP was sending a SWAT team of presales experts to talk at user group meetings or with IT managers who had trouble getting an order approved for a newer 3000.

HP 3000 SWAT team members like Vince Clapps were a proud addition to the sales effort. Now it looks like that push to place new hardware and earn the revenue up front for a system replacement was a fatigued concept. SWAT members locked down new customers doing ecommerce, but many times they'd speak at spots like a RUG conference to save a customer from migration.

Third party application vendors roadblocked the future for market growth, too, because they needed their revenue up front, too. Vendors like Cognos learned to create pricing that prohibited the upgrades of systems. Every boost of power threatened to ripple tens of thousands of dollars of software upgrades because the vendors were allowed to clamp on like pilot fish to the leviathan of buying a bigger 3000.

"They were reversed on how they handled licensing," Lester said over lunch. "In the channel today, these vendors make all of their money off the back-end rebates from Microsoft and the security companies out there. That became the new norm while HP was still on the front side of the sale."

Lester's employer Thomas Tech wants to educate the 3000 community that another generation of storage can be integrated with MPE that runs on HP's systems. HP-built computers are still the predominant hardware platform the MPE computing that will head toward 2028.

This back side of the newer revenue stream is what keeps vendors providing newer components. It's not about the computer gear as it was in those SWAT days. By 2018 the value lies in support and the opportunity to access the datacenter's non-MPE systems. To win the battle to keep 3000 resources on the market, new strategies are in play.