Must also be the end of the Boot camps...

From: "McQuaid, Ann" <ann.mcqu...@hpXX.com>
Date: Wed, 6 May 2009 18:54:02 +0000
Subject: OpenVMS Customer Program  Announcement

Dear OpenVMS Community,

After 15 years with OpenVMS Engineering, Sue Skonetski will be pursuing
new opportunities. She has made many contributions to OpenVMS during her
tenure which have led to OpenVMS' long standing success.  Many thanks to
Sue for her energy and dedication.

Sue will be succeeded by Sujatha Ramani who will assume Sue's
responsibilities including Technical Customer Programs and Communications,

Sujatha holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science and an MBA.  She
comes to this position with over 17 years of experience in the IT
industry.  She has been working for the last 11 years at HP and has
experience in a multitude of business units including PSG, TSG and IPG.
 Sujatha brings rich experience in Sales, Marketing, Operations,
Channels Management and Enterprise Account Management.  She has won
several recognitions including the "HP Presidents Club Winner" for
consistent sales performance.  Sujatha was recognized the "Young
Achiever" By CII (Confederation of Indian Industries) in the Corporate
IT category.

Please join me in welcoming Sujatha and in wishing Sue the very best.

Best regards,

Ann

P.S. If you plan on attending the HP Tech Forum, please stop by the
Business Critical Systems Booth and meet Sujatha.

I wish that HP would be a bit more honest and tell all of us what
it's doing to further destroy VMS and our livelihoods, but I have
never trusted HP.
--
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker    VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG

  http://www.quirkfactory.com/popart/asskey/eqn2.png

Sue's one of the best DEC/Compaq/HP people I've run into over the past
33 years.

Sue is a very professional and patient person. Her dedication to Digital
 goes far beyond the 15 years stated by Ann McQuaid. Digital has been
her career/family for (I am sure Sue can correct me on this) over 25
years. She knew Ken Olsen personally.

Guys, this shouldn't sound like an obituary. Sue is now free of HP's
hold, and will be able to pursue a new career inside or outside of VMS
community with a company/organisation that will undoubdtely greatly
value her personality, patience, perseverance, and especially her
personnal knowledge of a very valuable enterprise community. (the list
of positive qualifications is extensive, I can't list them all in one
message).

Sue was an incredible asset to her employer and will be to her next
employer. She has an incredible ability to keep the VMS community
together (and everyone here knows how demanding and complaining buch we
are !) despite the total lack of desire from HP to keep us informed. And
she had the uncanny ability to change people's attitude that VMS was
doomed into a positive attitude that VMS was succesful.

She also has had an extreme sense of professionalism and ability to toe
the corporate line when it was time to do so even if she disagreed with it.

When you consider all that VMS engineering has gone through since the
Palmer era, and especially what has been happening in the last few
months, Sue's dedication to her job has been remarkable. She has
continued to send out her newsletters, always as cheerful and positive
as ever.

Sue also brought to the VMS community something unique: A PERSONNAL TOUCH.

Consider the number of problems Sue was able to solve for large and
small customers alike and, contrary to many large corporations where
customers are nothing but numbers, Sue actually sought to meet and know
as many customers as she could on a personal level.

Since my VMScluster is about to celebrate's its 10th cluster_ftime
anniversary, seeing Sue leave does not make me any happier today.

   .../Ed

Sue is such a great person
... very big footprints for Sujatha to fill.

--
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker    VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG

  http://www.quirkfactory.com/popart/asskey/eqn2.png

You needed to be part of my distribution list to get the email, there
is no slight intended.

And I am still looking at this news group ;')

And no I was not fired, just looking for a job.

I can picture the advertisements now:
"HP (R) - No real products left, but we're probably too big to die!
(tm)".
(The Shrugging Businessman logo is a registered trademark of HP.)

This is... indescribably unfair. I hope Sue finds something much
better to do, in a better company. What she means to the community is
impossible to quantify (and thus hard for an MBA to understand), but
if it weren't for her, I would be considering VMS an interesting
historical footnote "by that guy who made Windows NT" like most other
people my age do, thanks to your impeccable mismanagement.

Thank you for such an amazing note.  And thanks to everyone else for
their support.

I am not real sure that the president of IBM reads the VMS news
group.

I will be reading HP mail until June 5th after that as a VMS fan on my
Hotmail account.

And who ever mentioned it, no I did not get fired.  But I am looking
for a job.

It would do a lot for me to get fired, I love what I do.  I work with
the smartest people in the world.

-What happens to the VMS ambassadors ? Do they still exist, or will they
be watered down because there is nobody to coordinate communications
with them ?

-What happens to Hobbyist programme ? Sue was the contact/coordinator.
Does that move to her replacement, or is that something that will be in
a vacuum ?

-What happens to coordination with the user group formerly known as
DECUS (I think it is called Connect this week ? Will Sue's replacement
in india be a central worldwide contact for VMS related issues, or will
there be some local representative in each country ?

-Will Sue's most excellent communications such as the Digital Technical
Journal, and her email updates continue with her replacement, or will
her replacement concentrate only on sale opportunities ?

Instead of bemoaning the past, why not accept that change happens and
start off by welcoming someone who has a very hard act to follow?

This has nothing to do with disrespect for Sue S., with whom I have
worked for more years than I can remember.
The note by someone pointing out that she is now "free" to pursue
activities without the "restrictions" placed on her by a very large
enterprise, is extremely important, I think. How about a Boot Camp
(under another name), organized by Sue and held in, say, Bangalore?
Nashua may be nice in the Spring and Fall, but, that hotel, all those
Yanks, ...

We should treat this change as an opportunity to regroup and look to
the future. If half of what you say about OpenVMS is true, then why
are so many of you so negative and sitting on your behinds instead of
getting together?

The Open Source movement is an example which we should attempt to
follow: have an idea, share it, build it, support it, have another
idea, ...

For those that feel the need to bash India and other things foreign,
perhaps they might like to think about how long their respective
countries have been considered "civilized" compared to India or China
for that matter? And how many of the indigenous population were
slaughtered by those arriving in the country who considered their way
was better?

As a country, India has done the right thing by investing in education
and now have very capable people. However, in most outsourcing schemes,
the original company does this to lower costs and gives the outsourcing
company defined work guidelines and phone answering scripts and the
people are not given the latitude to make decisions.

There are similar problems when you outsource locally too, with the
people brought in given very strict mandates that they cannot deviate from.

The problem with India is similar to Japan's image in the 1970s. They
had an image of building cheap plastic toys. It took them a couple of
decade to shed that image and obtain an image of high quality products.