RE: HP Buys Compaq

>  Chris Rehm:
>       On paper I agree with you, Compaq appears to be much more than just
a PC
>company. I mean, they did acquire DEC to fill out their high end as they
>already had a product line that extended from the bottom to mid range
>servers. But apparently the DEC side of the business hasn't been what they
>had hoped.

I agree with most everything you say about Compaq's DEC acquisition.  They
don't seem to have exploited DEC's high end as much as we might have
expected.  On the other hand VMS does not have a strong future, so Compaq is
left with True-64 Unix and NT.  Without NT on the Alpha chip I can
understand Compaq's strategy to move the Alpha servers to Intel chips
supporting True-64 and NT, rather than maintaining two chip technologies.
It's a shame though -- the Alpha chip was very powerful.  It's interesting
that HP was already heading in a similar direction by phasing out their RISC
chips in favor of Intel.

Nonetheless, Compaq maintains quite a bit of technology and services from
Tandem and DEC as well as what they had grown on their own.  Particularly in
comparison with Dell, Compaq still offers a much broader array of products
and services.  It's fairly common for technology and services to be pruned
in an acquisition.  We've contracted with Compaq for some pretty deep NT
clustering services, and even for our entire data center move.  We've bought
a fairly massive StorageWorks SAN.  They have enterprise tape library
solutions that far exceed the offerings of other "PC Companies".

Having done a lot of business with Compaq in the past few years I do feel
that they're quite a different business than a PC company such as Dell.

Many folks still think of NT servers as PC's, however, the back-end server
business has matured so much in the past few years.  Five years ago an NT
(or Novell) server really was a rack mounted PC with a bunch of hard drives.
Now we're running NT and Win2K on server clusters off a SAN.  I agree with
Leif that this is the type of technology that HP is after.

-Jim

James P. Damato
Manager - Technical Administration
Dollar General Corporation
<mailto:jdamato@dollargeneral.com>