HP's Alpha RetainTrust programme a complete bust

LAST SEPTEMBER, HP VP Rich Marcello announced the Alpha RetainTrust Program, an effort to keep current Alpha customers from wandering off the reservation and defecting to the Itanic, IBM -- or, horror or horrors -- the rapidly setting Sun Microsystems.

Briefly, Marcello said that Alpha customers would be well cared for during the multi-year transition to Itanium. Included in the RetainTrust Program were one-on-one briefings with key customers, one- on-many briefings with second-tier customers, Webcasts, collateral, white papers written by the software savants at Gartner (no friend of VMS or HP), and IDC. The program received heavy coverage in The Inq, in Shannon Knows HPC, and Ken Farmer's family of HP-centric Web sites, notably www.openvms.org.

While this is supposed to be a high-profile, high-cost campaign, it isn't reaching its desired target audience. Apparently the coverage didn't have the desired results, as many channel partners, a Top Tier distributor (Pioneer), and numerous customers and prospects claim to know nothing of the new program. Perhaps the BCS layoffs taking place this week, initially targeting marketingg resources, will help set things straight by dispensing with ineffectual marketeers whose continued employment at HP has ben nothing but a drain on stock value and HP resources.

Given the shaky position of the soon-to-be pasture-ized Tru64 UNIX, and HP's conscious decision to NOT promote OpenVMS to new customers, perhaps the lack of knowledge of the RetainTrust Program will serve as a wake-up call to aneemic marketeers.

But not all the news is bad: HP recently ran a survey wherein the company polled customers as to what apps they'd like to see on OpenVMS on Itanium (Oracle, Oracle Rdb, and the usual arrray of compiler and developent tools are shoo-ins) and what new apps they'd like to see ported to the unstoppable, bet-your-business OS. A portent of good things to come? Quite possibly, but only if HP gets its BCS marketing act together.

We can only hope this is the case. A quick read of HP's recent financials and some informed extrapolation will prove that OpenVMS is a $800USD-in-profit cash cow that is being milked to the tune of more than $100M USD per annum to prop up Tru64 UNIX and the Risky Consolidated Enterprise UNIX scheme (made even riskier since the Tru64 UNIX kernel developers, whose participation is essential to the new and improved UNIX offering, have been cashiered). Mo

Hello, HP. Have you woken up yet? µ