How has the demise of Interex affected your membership? Our community is at 10,000 [members]. We'd like to increase membership over this next year. Primarily, the way we're hoping to address that is to embrace the former Interex members and the partners involved with the Interex community -- the other HP user group. We've already started that. We have a letter going out [today]. The mailing list for the membership of Interex was purchased by HP, and so they're actually going to do a mailing for us with an opt-in to become an Encompass member. We've extended the free membership to any former Interex members to March 2006.
We have been growing our local presence within the local user groups. We're continuing to get some local user groups started up. One other way we'll do this is being in contact with previous local Interex user groups.
Have you already seen a boost in membership from former Interex members? Yes, we have. A ballpark 150 members have joined to date. We plan to grow our membership by 25%. We are continuing our outreach efforts to the Interex community and have extended the free membership opportunity to March 31. In addition, Encompass is working closely with the HP Certified Professional Program and has extended membership and community offers to that group as well.
Are you finding that former Interex members are a bit jaded about what HP did? Not the ones I'm dealing with. I could understand it. We've all gone through times where we've gone through disappointments, especially in a volunteer position. I can't say we're immune to it either. Encompass has had its moments. So far it's been a warm welcome for us, and they seem to be embracing it.
You also had to deal with the HP Technology Forum being postponed and then moved as a result of last fall's hurricanes. What are your plans this year? The Technology Forum is going to be held in Houston, Texas, during hurricane season -- Sept. 17-22. We expect to see double the attendance at that one. We had roughly 4,000 people at the Orlando event, which we were grateful for, considering that event had moved.
How have Encompass members reacted to Carly Fiorina's departure from HP, and its new leadership under Mark Hurd? We typically don't get involved in the business politics. We're primarily focused on the technology. Mark did show up at [the user] event in Orlando. He was very well received. It was a very different presence than we'd seen in the past. He was very focused and results-oriented, and it appears if you look at the earnings report and the press ... they're getting the results they expect. I know I'm having to wait on lead times to get hardware.
The Opteron ... [and] the [HP ProLiant] DL585 servers are a little backed up on the delivery. It's just demand.
So you feel like they're executing well? Seems to be. They've made some recent, good hires. And it looks like a very positive future.
What would you like to see HP address from a technology standpoint? I'd like to have lower cost. A lot of our community is also focused on virtualization and business integration. Obviously, your data center is pretty homogenous now in terms of the number of servers available to you. HP provides some good management tools to tie all those together. I think hardware is going to become more and more of a commodity, so whatever tools and technology can be produced to manage that is going to help lower the cost of running a large data center.
Is virtualization coming through on its promise to ease data center management? We personally bought some DL585s and connected them up to the [storage-area network], and the number of servers we were able to connect up and performance we got was almost triple what we were doing before. So I think it's getting there.
What does your membership see as the key issues this year? We think we know, but we're not sure we know. So that's one of the investments Encompass plans to make this year -- [to do] inbound marketing to find out what is important to the user base and help expand on the delivery of our services, whether its eLearning or collaboration tools or conference content. We need to be a lot more aggressive about it.
Will you be performing user surveys this year? The worldwide survey that the Interex organization used to sponsor along with HP, we'll be brokering that this year for the user community. We're in the process of finalizing that, as well. It usually runs in the summer or early fall. The timeline shifted a little because Interex. Encompass will drive the process side of it this year.