PCM Takes an H-P "Snapshot"

PCM, a major H-P distributor and services provider, has produced a very informative graphic encapsulating the H-P split. Thanks, PCM!

HP's Corporate Evolution

October 8, 2014: It was all over the news this week that Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman will be splitting the company in two, with Whitman leading Hewlett-Packard Enterprise in selling business IT. The other company, HP Inc., will focus on PCs and printers. (Each will have revenue of more than $55 billion.)

Whitman went on to explain that the H-P Enterprise company will be dedicated to helping companies "get from traditional IT -- and by the way, run that traditional IT better -- but to get from there to the new style of IT characterized by cloud and security and big data and mobility." Whitman said the four main parts of the enterprise business are infrastructure ("the foundation for the new style of IT"), services, software, and the cloud.

As Chris Murphy pointed out in InformationWeek, "HP is adapting to a world where the data center matters more than ever as an engine for business growth, but the individual pieces of that data center matter less."

Many Incarnations
Hewlett-Packard has been through many, many incarnations. It got its legendary start in Palo Alto in the single-car garage of William Hewlett along with his partner David Packard in January 1939. They both got electrical engineering degrees from Stanford in 1935 and established their company with an initial investment of $538. It was incorporated in 1947 and went public ten years later. 

According to Wikipedia, "Of the many projects they worked on, their very first financially successful product was a precision audio oscillator, the ModelHP200A. Their innovation was the use of a small incandescent light bulb (known as a "pilot light") as a temperature dependent resistor in a critical portion of the circuit, the negative feedback loop which stabilized the amplitude of the output sinusoidal waveform. This allowed them to sell the Model 200A for $54.40 when competitors were selling less stable oscillators for over $200.... One of the company's earliest customers was Walt Disney Productions which bought eight Model 200B oscillators (at $71.50 each) for use in certifying the Fantasound surround sound systems installed in theaters for the movie Fantasia" in the 1950s."

In the 1960s they specialized in electronic test equipment: signal generators, voltmeters, oscilloscopes, frequency counters, thermometers, wave analyzers, and so on, most of which which were more sensitive, accurate, and precise than other comparable equipment.

Hewlett-Packard's HP Associates division, established around 1960, developed semiconductor devices primarily for use in test instruments and calculators. Some of these scientific calculators were extremely sophisticated and purpose-built. I still have an HP-12C Financial Calculator in its original packaging, designed for finance, real, and banking applications, programmable up 99 steps on 20 storage registers, "RPN logic" to reduce keystrokes, do bond management functions, calculate depreciation, and do statistical analysis (mean, standard deviation, linear regression, and correlation coefficient). It was a gift to me from HP when I paid them a visit in the 1980s, and I have the original packaging because I can barely understand what it does, let alone how it works!

Computers
HP got into the computer market in 1966 with the HP 2100/HP 1000 series of minicomputers. These had a simple accumulator-based design, with registers very similar to those used in the Intel x86 architecture. 

"Wired" magazine called HP the producer of the world's first device to be called a "personal computer," the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, introduced in 1968. The company called it a desktop calculator because Bill Hewlett said, "If we had called it a computer, it would have been rejected by our customers' computer gurus because it didn't look like an IBM. We therefore decided to call it a calculator, and all such nonsense disappeared." An engineering triumph, the logic circuit had no integrated circuits; the CPU was made of discrete components. With a CRT display, magnetic-card storage, and a printer, the price was around $5,000. The machine's keyboard was a cross between a scientific calculator and an adding machine and had no alphabetic keys.

The HP3000

This is where it gets interesting, and close to home. The HP 3000 series is a family of minicomputers released by Hewlett-Packard in 1972. It was designed to be the first minicomputer with a full-featured operating system with time-sharing (for access by multiple users simultaneously). The first model of the 3000 was withdrawn in 1973 until speed improvements and OS stability could be achieved. When reintroduced in 1974, it became known as a reliable and powerful business system that regularly won HP business from companies using IBM's mainframes. Hewlett-Packard initially called it the System/3000, then changed that to the HP3000.

It was a "workhorse," a rugged and powerful machine that was extremely popular in a wide variety of business environments. The Energizer Bunny of computers, it refused to die and was not withdrawn from support by HP until Dec. 31, 2010(!). 

The Sales Phenomenon

The reason I wanted to write this blog post is that I became personally acquainted with this very important part of HP's corporate culture in the mid-1980s, when I began a 30-year career consulting with direct marketing and catalog companies (now also eCommerce companies, of course) to help them select a system to manage their business. There were a couple of dozen systems designed specifically to manage that kind of enterprise at that period of time, and one of the most aggressively marketed of these ran on the HP3000.

This was no accident. And this is the key thing here. HP hired a very professional sales force of field sales reps who had a simple but nearly fool-proof approach to getting the job done. Their success in the catalog field will serve as an example of their methodology.

The HP rep in New Jersey was contacted by the Musical Heritage Society (MHS), a company in Ocean, NJ, near Asbury Park, that sold LP records by mail on a club basis, much like a book club (one of their most popular records included Pachelbel's famous and much-loved Canon in D.)  Since MHS mailed millions of packages of club offers and LPs each month, it needed a powerful computer system that would help it manage these activities more efficiently, and better yet, analyze the results of their mailings.

The person who contacted HP was a fellow by the name of Will Smith, their in-house programmer who had already developed his system, tailored specifically for MHS, and discussed migrating it to the HP3000. Very shortly thereafter, Smith, sensing a major opportunity, decided to leave MHS and set up a software company with a partner, Gary Brooks. The company was called Brooksmith Associates, and the catalog management system they brought to market was called "Prophit." 

And here's where the story really takes off. The HP rep in New Jersey, now in league with Brooksmith Associates, had rocket fuel in his engines. He approached a major, very well known company, Edmund Scientific in Barrington, 12 miles southeast of Philadelphia, with a compelling but simple sales pitch: "I have a system designed specifically for catalog companies that happens to run on the HP3000, one of the most durable and reliable hardware platforms available." I don't know for sure, but I'm quite certain the lead time on this sale was extremely short. An in-depth demo or two, plus the knowledge that Edmund Scientific would be the first "showcase" user of the Prophit system and would have Prophit tailored specifically to meet their needs, would almost certainly have sealed the deal. I doubt there was much in the way of a discount on the system cost, but the modifications to meet Edmund Scientific's requirements could have been done at a reduced price, or some such similar deal (maybe a few years of free "support" fees). 

In any case, it worked like a charm. Goldberg's Marine (another catalog company, now in NYC but I believe at that time in New Jersey) bought it shortly after Edmund Scientific.  

The system was a huge success for the following reasons: (1) it worked! That was more than could be said of many competing catalog management systems in those days. (2) It was being used by two very well known direct marketing companies, MHS and Ed Sci. (3) It ran on an undisputed workhorse of a computer that was already widely acknowledged as a rock-solid machine. (4) It had the HP sales force as a ready-made sales behemoth to sell the system nationwide, although Will Smith was a very effective salesman in his own right and always liked to brag that whenever a Prophit user needed to upgrade his hardware Will would sell him "more disk." And disks in those days were plenty expensive!

The National Roll-Out
That chemistry is the critical piece of this entire puzzle. The New Jersey rep from HP was not a lone wolf. He was just like a dozen or so other HP reps in other territories across the country. BSA could focus mostly on software development and system implementation and configuration, while HP was almost completely in charge of sales and marketing, which they did very well, indeed, working in league with BSA's very solid systems sales team.

This was a "marriage made in heaven." And it depended on the very strong, exceptionally tenacious sales skills of the HP3000 sales reps. This was an elite team, and they had a powerful weapon in Prophit that they employed with world-class success. 

Hewlett-Packard in those days was exactly that kind of company, very well-tuned to selling hardware with a software solution tailored to both the HP3000 platform and to what we now call "the vertical market" that the software would be used by. 

Not long afterward, Gary Brooks cashed out and Will Smith partnered with Allan Gardner to form Smith Gardner & Associates, Inc. They renamed Prophit as "Ecometry," and in the mid-'90s relocated from New Jersey to Florida, did an IPO in 1999, and then in 2004 sold the company to a partnership consisting of equity firm Golden Gate Capital and a group of Ecometry executives led by then-CEO John Marrah. Via Golden Gate they also brought the Blue Martini eCommerce platform into the fold. When John Marrah took over, Smith and Gardner cashed in their chips, leaving behind one of the single largest groups of HP 3000 application customers in the world.

At about the same time under Golden Gate Capital, Ecometry merged with a company called GERS Retail on the West Coast to become “Escalate Retail,” developing an “open” version of the system running on either SQL/Server or Oracle on Windows or UNIX boxes. They were actually ahead of the game in supporting mCommerce apps. The company was acquired by software giant Red Prairie in 2011, then in late 2013 it was sold to global powerhouse JDA, with Escalate Retail rechristened “JDA Direct Commerce," which is how things stand today.

The Moral of the Story
HP has long since abandoned its aggressive hardware field sales force and its software-leading strategy, at least as far as I know and at least in the terms described above. To the best of my knowledge, it has gone through quite a few "incarnations" since the 1980s when BSA and Prophit got off the ground on the strength of HP's sales chops. 

But obviously the company continues to evolve. The whole point of this blog post is to demonstrate that what HP just did in splitting itself in two is not a break with the past but rather a continuation of a tradition that goes back to the founders, emphasizing technical innovation, corporate refabrication and reincarnation, and redefining the state of the art in systems management. 

P.S.
I remember in either the late '80s or the early '90s when HP starting pushing its newly developed laser printers (which quickly became the most popular printer for awhile), there was a rather public cadre of "purists" both inside and outside the company who complained that this was a "distraction" from their primary corporate mission. It was anything but, and is another example of HP's being a step or two ahead of the market.

P.P.S.
In that same general category, HP also has a line of major digital presses and label/package printing presses. These are industrial grade and industrial size. They've also got an entire line of other digital printing services. Although not generally known outside of professional printing circles, it is definitely a major player in that space, and I suspect an innovative one, as well. [A small footnote: before I was Editor of Target Marketing from 1981 to 1983, I was an Assoc. Editor of Printing Impressions for about six months. The same company published both trade journals in Philadelphia.]

P3S Consistent with all of the above, HP has often been at the forefront of handheld computing devices. Back in the late 90s/early 00s I absolutely loved my Jornada, like the one pictured below. It had a touch screen and a stylus (the silver bar on the right front base is the end of it that you pushed it out from), and of course Web connectivity. I used it partly for Web surfing but mostly for checking and writing email and as a PDA for note taking. Having the keyboard was a pleasure! I once left it on a plane in the seat pocket and realized it just as I deboarded. When the attendant I spoke to about it saw the frantic look on my face, she kindly let me back on to retrieve it. Probably against the rules, but all's well that ends well.

I think it had 16 MB of RAM, a 6.5 inch screen, and weighed about three pounds, by no means light but not a total brick, either. It fit nicely in my briefcase, and could be used virtually anywhere, even in sunlight. It ran on Windows CE, which detractors liked to call "Wince," but I never had any problems with it. Everything was searchable, file structure was standard Windows, it had versions of Word and Excel, and the battery life was quite long. I don't remember ever worrying about charging it, which meant it was efficient, as well. It connected to my PC to synchronize files, if I wished. For the truly geeky or curious, here is a link to the manual for a model virtually identical to mine.

Jacques Vert Group Relies on MNP's Modular OMS for Multichannel Management

Evolving from a concession-only store-based business to an omnichannel retailer requires strategic thinking. Jacques Vert Group, the British fashion house and womenswear concession retailer, resolved this by making new internal appointments to ensure the business had a new retailing platform fit for its purposes and best placed to take the business forward.

Key to the business is to harmonize the inventory, ensure availability, and deliver the brand promise to both the trade and a growing number of direct customers.

Jacques Vert relied on its incumbent Merrit retail sales platform supported by Retail Assist for the Product Lifecycle Management and buying function, as well as the merchandising, plus a WMS for logistics. They implemented a new eCommerce platform from DemandWare with its ability to scale and manage the challenges of cross-border direct retailing; this was handled by London-based Tryzens.

But the big challenge for the business was how to join all this together to provide a robust, efficient end-to-end solution centrally supporting the business with real-time information. A modular OMS platform from MNP Media Ltd. in Salisbury now provides the crucial middleware. Integrated to receive the basic SKU information from Merrit, the OMS further embellishes product information, manages the local inventory, and presents this to all direct sales channels. Receiving orders from 9 concurrent websites, the OMS allocates inventory in real-time to ensure customer expectations are managed. A Sunderland-based customer service team uses the OMS to provide order taking and customer services for all channels.

The selection of the OMS platform was based on MNP’s proven track record of high volume order processing together with its experience in multi-channel retail both in the UK and overseas. As MNP's clients include Lakeland Limited, Kurt Geiger, Pure Collection and LK Bennett, Jacques Vert Group considered it was in good company.

Celerant Introduces Web-based Stratus Retail

Celerant Technology Corp is offering anticipates further enhancements to its existing omni-channel retail solutions in eCommerce, mCommerce, and mobile solutions.

“During this past year, we have laid the groundwork for omni-channel retailing with the introduction of new mobile technology, vertical-specific interfaces and even standalone applications that do not require a wireless connection,” said Ian Goldman, CEO of Celerant. “Celerant’s integrated system will provide retailers with greater flexibility and efficiency in selling and fulfilling across multiple channels and locations and thereby increasing their earning potential.”

Celerant’s new web-based, complete system, Stratus Retail, which was unveiled at the NRF Show, as well as several Command Mobile and standalone inventory applications, including mobile POS, price check, physical inventory, transfers, purchase order entry and receiving, enable retailers to manage their business from anywhere in the store, and from almost any location. Celerant also introduced catalog interfaces with a wide, and continuously increasing, range of vendors for any vertical, including bicycle, sporting goods, firearms and more.

An Open Letter to Meg Whitman

Now that Meg Whitman is President and CEO of Hewlett Packard, she has expressed an interest in returning to its heydey, when it "served the channel."

Indeed it did, and in the 1970s through the 1990s it was very successful with its HP/3000, a "workhorse" "minicomputer" that a half dozen or so very popular OMS vendors (we didn't call them that then) relied on. They relied on Suprtool, a flexible Swiss-army knife utility programming language supported by the HP/3000, to supplement their standard systems, and with it were able to "customize" a lot of their functionality for each user.

When Windows-based systems began to mature after Y2K, the 3000 faded from the scene. But while it was around, it was a force to be reckoned with.

If Whitman is able to recapture that kind of channel relationship in multichannel marketing (and other verticals), she will make some very large waves, indeed.

Dydacomp Introduces SaaS System

Dydacomp, vendor of the Multichannel Order Manager(M.O.M.) system and SiteLINK eCommerce platform, has announced its first new product in many years: Freestyle Commerce. 

Freestyle is a cloud-based order management solution for retailers who are automating order processing for the first time. It‘s functionality is intended as a subset of the existing capabilities in M.O.M., with a few new things made possible because it’s an online-only system. The system was developed from scratch, however, with no code reused from M.O.M. or SiteLINK. 

M.O.M. and SiteLINK will continue to be sold, enhanced and supported. They are Dydacomp’s core products and M.O.M. will remain their only on-premise order management software solution. SiteLINK will work exclusively with M.O.M.

Freestyle is an alternative for new customers to consider when automating their order management processes. It is not an upgrade to or replacement for M.O.M., and it is not a hosted version of M.O.M. Many of the more advanced features in M.O.M. are not initially available in Freestyle but will be added over time.

There is no end-of-life planned for the M.O.M. or SiteLINK products, either. Dydacomp intends to continue to enhance, sell and support both those products. 

With Freestyle Commerce, retailers can:

• Keep customers informed about in-stock, committed, back-ordered, packed, or shipped items
• Seamlessly integrate fulfillment operations across multiple channels into a single workflow from shopping to shipping
• Sell their entire stock or just a small subset through Amazon.
• Automatically download new orders, publish product information and synchronize inventory across channels

Business Agility Adds Value

Michael Hugos, author of Business Agility, writes in the current issue of CIO that when he worked for a company that supplied Starbucks with paper cups they were not the lowest-cost provider. But they "found 20 things we could do to make our cups easier to order, easier to use, easier to pay for and easier to plan and budget for." When they kept enhancing these as Starbucks's business needs changed they "provided a compelling reason to buy from us. Because we delivered more value than Starbucks could have gotten from a plain, low-priced paper cup, and because we were agile and responsive to the evolving needs of a high-value customer, we earned 2 percent more than the market price on our cups. I call this extra profit the 'agility dividend.'” This is how CIOs have to think to truly add value to the systems they manage.

Datamann Becomes Morse Data Reseller

Datamann, Inc., a provider of integrated data management solutions for multi-channel marketers and the MOSP order management solution, and Morse Data Corporation, a provider of enterprise management systems for multi-channel merchants, third-party fulfillment companies and publishers, have announced that Datamann has become an authorized reseller of Morse Data’s InOrder enterprise management software.

Datamann will make InOrder available to smaller companies and offer users of Datamann’s legacy MOSP (Mail Order Software Plus) order management solution an upgrade path to SQL-based order management solution. Additionally, because Datamann is also an authorized reseller of Radiant Systems CounterPoint point-of-sale (POS) software, Datamann will integrate CounterPoint SQL’s functionality with that of InOrder for InOrder users who wish to expand their retail operations.

Datamann Co-Owner and Chief Operating Officer William Mann said the Datamann-Morse Data partnership gives his company new ways to help businesses grow. “For example,” Mann said, “when InOrder catalog and e-commerce customers wish to add retail operations, we’ll integrate the point-of-sale capabilities of CounterPoint software with the catalog fulfillment, phone order management and website functionality of InOrder software. And as our customers wish to migrate from MOSP to a Windows-based solution and all the benefits that come with using a SQL database, we can provide a seamless upgrade to InOrder. It’s a great combination to please customers and control costs.”

Morse Data Founder and Chief Executive Officer James Morse said the agreement with Datamann is a win-win solution for all parties. “We welcome the opportunity to serve Datamann’s MOSP and CounterPoint customers,” Morse said. “InOrder offers Datamann’s customers a contemporary software solution while allowing them to be converted, implemented and supported by the Datamann team, with whom they are comfortable and familiar,” Morse said. “In addition, in the past we have had a size threshold for the companies we could serve. Datamann is reducing that threshold to only four or five users, making it possible for small businesses to obtain the enterprise management software they need to grow.”

To assist Datamann in the early stages of the relationship, Morse Data is sharing the management of data conversion, implementation and training for Datamann’s InOrder customers. Ultimately, Datamann will manage all phases of the sales, deployment and configuration process, including ongoing customer support.

Introducing SigmaCommerce 4.2

Sigma Micro has announced the upcoming availability of its direct commerce order management solution, SigmaCommerce 4.2, scheduled for a 2008 mid-summer release.

New benefits and features include:

PRODUCT RATINGS, REVIEWS, BLOGS
In conjunction with Sigma Micro’s new integrated Web 2.0 partner Last Piece Software, Product Ratings and Reviews are available for clients to create an online customer loyalty experience. They also leverage feedback from customers to build long-term relationships.

DEEP LINK URL CREATION WIZARDS
Deep Link URL Creation Wizards allow direct retailers to integrate content with commerce for an internet e-mail or keyword marketing strategy. You can also use generated URLs and source codes in other campaign management tools such as Google Adwords, FireClick, or Yahoo! Paid Search.

FEATURED ITEMS CONTROL
The Featured Items Control provides for more automated dynamic merchandising rules. These allow you to dynamically generate Hot Sellers for the Home Page and Landing Pages relevant to the category page or group page a shopper is navigating.

FRAUD MANAGEMENT CONTROL
With expanded configurability of User-Defined Holds, retailers can control fraud management by placing an order on hold for credit reasons, bogus addresses, specific countries, or just to monitor an operator.

MULTI-DIVISION BRANDING
SigmaCommerce 4.2 allows retailers to maintain and attach specifically branded documents and communication materials. The new Document Control allows retailers to build unique branding around each product in item detail pages. This creates a rich media “experience” while providing a quick and easy way to publish return policies, how-to videos, workshops, and instruction sheets. Using the CSS Import Utility, retailers can create and import unique site themes to enhance site ranking in search engines and give shoppers the experience they demand.