~ Candidates for Board of Directors ~

For your consideration, here are the candidates for election to the OpenMPE Board of Directors. Review them carefully so that you can vote during the election.

John Wolff

John Wolff is Vice President/CIO of LAACO, Ltd., which owns and operates Self Storage properties and private clubs in the south-western US. He has directed development of LAACO's custom software on various HP3000's since 1982 for its private club business. LAACO continues to enhance its software and will homestead on the HP3000 for many years to come.

John is a dedicated supporter of the HP3000/MPE/IMAGE and believes this remarkable platform still has a future to be fulfilled. He previously worked for HP in the software development lab of the Data Systems Division (pre-CSY) in Cupertino from 1968 thru 1974, when the HP3000 was being conceived. developed and introduced.

Ron Horner

I've spent that past 15 years working on the HP3000 platform. After a time, working for several companies, I began Horner Consulting. Horner Consulting is a consulting firm that caters to the needs of the MPE community. At the same time, pushing the comfort zones of IT departments. Our motto is Get EXTREME with your MPE. We do just that, every single day. My experience is quite well rounded, from applications programming to operations management and systems administration. Throw in a little web programming, Access development, and business management for a little excitement.

Donna Garverick

My initial experience with the HP3000 was in 1981 in college. Since then I have been an operator, programmer and system manager on many, many different system for multiple companies. I was elected to chair SIG SysMan in 1998 and became co-chair of SIG MPE in 2002.

John Burke

John Burke is the founder of Burke Consulting and Technology Solutions, specializing in system management, IT consulting, transition planning and outsourcing. Mr. Burke has over 25 years experience in all aspects of IT and IT management, including systems, operations and development. He is co-Chair of SIGMPE, vice-Chair of the MPE Forum, a frequent presenter at HP3000-related conferences and has been writing regularly for publication about HP3000 issues for over thirteen years.

From 1997 through 2002, Mr. Burke was Systems and Operations Manager for Pacific Coast Building Products (PCBP), a $700 million/year manufacturer and distributor of building products. He had overall responsibility for 4 HP3000s (700+ users on the production system), 80+ Wintel servers, System Administration (4 NT Administrators), Help Desk Support (4 client support representatives), Desktop Support (4 technicians). Mr. Burke planned and supervised the implementation of significant infrastructure growth to support PCBP’s move from in-house developed HP 3000-based systems to SAP R/3 using Oracle on Wintel servers. Apache/iX and Samba/iX played a major role in PCBP’s migration to SAP R/3. The Samba/iX interface to the Wintel servers was used in daily production from mid-1998 through 2002, moving mission-critical data back and forth between systems. Apache/iX was used to create a documentation server for the IT department.

In 2000, Mr. Burke planned and coordinated the remodeling of a backup data center and the subsequent move of the existing corporate data center across town to this newly remodeled site. Just before leaving PCBP, Mr. Burke prepared the plan for upgrading the company’s WinNT network to Windows 2000 and Active Directory.

During his time at PCBP, Mr. Burke dramatically reduced both planned and unplanned downtime and significantly improved backup reliability. This resulted in a dramatic improvement in overall system reliability, availability and performance.

From mid-1998 through the first quarter of 2000, without taking away from his responsibilities to PCBP, Mr. Burke remotely managed the HP 3000 systems and maintained the application suite for Construction Computer Center, 3000 miles away in Pennsylvania. Only two on-site visits were made during the entire almost two year engagement. This helps prove Mr. Burke’s assertion that Outsourced System Management is a way for small to mid-sized companies to economically obtain expert-level system administration.

Since 1995, Mr. Burke has been a regular monthly contributor to The 3000 NewsWire. His “Hidden Value” and “net.digest” columns, beginning with June 2000 as well as the “Best of” compendium of columns prior to June 2000 appear in searchable form at www.burke-consulting.com. From 1990 until joining The 3000 NewsWire, Mr. Burke appeared regularly in HP Professional magazine.

Mr. Burke spent almost nine years as IS Manager for a provider of payroll and accounting services targeted at the construction industry. He completely revamped its aging user-hostile software portfolio, and spearheaded the company’s entry into the turnkey market. Mr. Burke spent nine years as Director of MIS for a mid-sized manufacturer of colorants and coatings used by the pharmaceutical, food and confectionery industries. He rescued a computerization project that was eating up resources and showing no return and later in his tenure designed and implemented a new generation of MRP II software that help improve inventory turns and reduce waste. Mr. Burke spent four years as IS Manager for an Environmental Engineering firm consolidating all computer processing on an in-house system and designed and implemented a sewer and water allocation management system that was still in use, essentially unchanged, 15 years later.

Mr. Burke has a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan. He also has an M.A. in Mathematics from the University of Colorado and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado. Mr. Burke holds CDP certification (#791576) and is HP Certified in MPE/iX System Administration (3HO-001). Mr. Burke currently teaches college mathematics part time at Sierra College and Folsom Lake College. While studying for his M.S. in Computer Science, Mr. Burke worked for IBM in the Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) department at its tape drive/system facility just outside Boulder, Colorado developing failure and reliability prediction models.

Alan Tibbetts

Industry experience:
Digital circuit designer 1973-present
Systems software designer 1975-present
Emulation systems designer 2000-present

HP experience:
HP1000 user, system manager 1974-1978
HP Systems Engineer 1978-1982
Consultant specializing in HP real-time systems 1983-2000
Consultant to the HP1000 systems software labs 1985-1993 & 1996-1999
Featherweight user of various HP3000 systems 1978-1999

Volunteer experience:
Presenter at Interex conferences from 1985-2000
Member of the Board of Directors of Interex 1992-1995
Interex representative to the World-Wide Users Council 1996-1998
Member of the Executive Council of InterWorks, 1995-1998
Member of the HP Real-Time Advisory Council 1992-2000

During my tenure on the Interex BoD, I negotiated the merger between Interex and InterWorks. I then served on the Executive Council of InterWorks during the transition period.

I was especially pleased receive an invitation from HP to serve as a member of the Real-Time Advisory Council. The RTAC helped the HP1000 group to provide for a graceful termination of the HP1000 product line over an eight year period, with the goal of minimizing customer disruptions to the extent possible. The RTAC operated under non-disclosure constraints, similar to OpenMPE, so I am familiar with the tensions that such an arrangement can produce.

For the past four years, I have been involved in software, hardware, and firmware design of a product which replaces the HP1000 computer systems.

The company I work for, Strobe Data Inc., produces modern versions of the Data General, Digital Equipment, and Hewlett-Packard minicomputers, and has an announced interest in producing a similar product for the MPE systems. This fits very closely with the mission of OpenMPE and I feel that my experience in producing and marketing real products may help to move OpenMPE beyond the "wouldn't it be nice" stage.

My management has committed to providing the resources that I will need to be a contributing member of the OpenMPE BoD.

Stephen A. Suraci

As a fledgling college graduate, my first responsibility was managing a Series 42, and as they say…”the rest is history”. My experience with the HP e3000 has been three-fold. Initially, as a software application user, I was responsible for administering the ERP software that ran on the platform. I then changed companies, and moved to a software supplier where my responsibilities included product development and application support for a software application, GrowthPower. Currently, among my other daily responsibilities, I am the president of Pivital Solutions. Pivital is an authorized HP reseller, 3rd party software reseller, and MPE support and technical services organization. We will support the MPE platform until the very last homesteader shuts off the lights and finally goes home for good!

Candidate Justification

As a vendor that has been earning a livelihood from the HP e3000 for all of my adult life, I believe I have a vested interest in the OpenMPE cause. I have successfully built an HP e3000 centric organization. This growth took place during a time when doing so was not necessarily a popular path to follow. We have remained focused and constant in our vision that we can make a name for ourselves in the market space, and we are doing so by earning the respect and trust of our customers. In the past several years we have seen our efforts come to fruition. Many of our customers are potential homesteaders and it is our intent and commitment to support these customers for as long as they require it. Inclusion as a board member of OpenMPE will give me an opportunity to be the voice of not only the customers that we represent, but also the MPE community at large.