There is strength in numbers, according to the leaders of three HP user groups, who this week announced they will seek approval to join forces and pool resources to better serve more than 50,000 members worldwide.

"As a much larger single organization our ability to be an advocate for our members to HP will be a real value to our members and to HP," says Nina Buik, president of Encompass, an HP technology user group, and senior vice president of MindIQ, a Norcross, Ga., IT training and eLearning company. (Read a column Buik wrote for Network World last fall on IT Horror Stories.)

Encompass, which has 16,000 members, serves IT professionals that work in complex, multi-system computing environments, focusing on HP (and legacy Compaq and Digital) products including HP-UX, Enterprise Storage, Enterprise Unix, OpenVMS, Linux and Windows. ITUG, an acronym which once stood for International Tandem Users Group, now goes by ITUG as the Tandem product line doesn't exist anymore. But the group of 3,500 members continued to share information on HP's NonStop-related solutions and services. HP Interex EMEA represents the largest network of HP customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and consists of 35,000 members across 45 countries.

Encompass, ITUG and HP Interex EMEA recently approached the boards of each independent user group and obtained approval to put a vote to the groups' membership this spring allowing the three to become one. The yet-to-be-named group hopes to have garnered membership approval in time for HP's Tech Forum and Software Forum conferences in Las Vegas this June, but more important is that HP independent user groups are able to better serve their communities with programs targeting young IT workers, says Scott Healy, as well as those in remote geographic locations. The group also intends to take advantage of Web 2.0 and social networking technologies to foster community among its members, says Healy, who is the chairman of ITUG and vice president of industry solutions at Golden Gate Software.

"We are really looking at how the new generation of technology professionals grew up and how they work together. We see this social networking phenomenon and see it as a great way to connect," Healy says. Sites such as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn seem to attract younger professionals and the user groups intend to put technology like that in place to connect its user community. "We have plans for new programs that would require funding to get recruitment and training resources in place for new people," he says.