Compaq & Hewlett-Packard: The Great Product Dilemma

While Compaq and Hewlett-Packard address who'll remain in the executive suite, they must also take a look at their product suites. The task of combining Compaq and HP will require making difficult determinations. Here's our take:

Notebooks/Laptops
Evo, Armada
Compaq's notebook line includes the Evo and Armada families. Some customers have been puzzled by the overlapping features, which, although competitive, have created confusion--not to mention extra overhead--for Compaq. Competitively priced, the two families have been under heavy pressure from both Dell and IBM, which have waged a fierce price war.

Omnibook
When unveiled, HP Omnibook notebooks were technology leaders. They still are, but now they lack some of the awareness that Dell, IBM and Sony have achieved. At 3.5 lbs., the Omnibook 500 is one of the lighter units on the market. HP's units have big 12.1-inch screens, and newer models feature wireless LAN capabilities.

PCs
Evo, Deskpro
With 15.4 percent of the market last year, Compaq was the No. 2 player in PCs in the United States, and remains so today, according to Dataquest. While soft sales have affected all leading PC companies, Compaq's sales slumped the most in Q2, Dataquest says. Battered by a price war, the company is struggling. Last year, it overhauled its PC lineup with the introduction of new Deskpros.

Pavilion, Vectra
HP's Vectra line has made strides but, like Compaq, hasn't gained much ground on Dell. The No. 3 player in the United States last year, HP's shipments grew by 43.2 percent in 2000, mainly in retail. This year, sales have stagnated. HP remains No. 3 in the United States, but saw volumes slip 18.8 percent in Q2, according to Dataquest.

Entry-Level Servers
ProLiant
Compaq maintains industry leadership in total server shipments with a 26.7 percent share as of June 2001, according to Dataquest. Newer ProLiants boast 1.26-GHz performance and some have Itanium chips. According to Technology Business Research, Compaq is No. 1 in customer satisfaction in industry-standard servers.

Netserver
HP's Netserver line boasts a four-way system powered by an Itanium microprocessor, which HP helped Intel design. Most Netserver systems feature redundant components, intelligent subsystems and server clustering technology. Channel conflict and price warring with IBMhave crimped growth.

Midrange Servers
AlphaServer
In July, Compaq unveiled Computing-on-Demand, a pay-for-use pricing scheme for its AlphaServers and Himalayas. This summer, Compaq updated Tru64 Unix and enhanced AlphaServer systems. Compaq will support customers who deployed 32-bit Windows on Alpha systems. Going forward, Compaq has decided to focus its 64-bit development on Intel-based Itanium products.

9000 Unix Servers A-class, L-class; HP Servers rp7400-class, rp8400-class
HP's midrange line constitutes the company's workhorse systems for ERP, CRM, e-intelligence and e-commerce applications. IDC says HP is the worldwide No. 2 Unix server vendor and that its Unix server revenue grew 16.7 percent in 2000.

High-End Enterprise Systems
Nonstop Himalaya
Compaq's high-end strategy includes a blend of acquired and internally developed systems from DEC, Tandem and Compaq itself. Recently, the company decided to standardize Compaq's enterprise server product lines on the Itanium microprocessor from Intel. CEO Michael Capellas has assured customers that the platform remains critical.

9000 Unix Servers V-series, Superdome
HP offers two-way systems all the way up to 32-way systems in its V-class family. The Superdome line boasts 16-, 32- and 64-way systems. The HP 9000 V-class supports more than 15,000 ISV apps for HP-UX. In August, HP and Oracle announced a record-breaking data warehousing benchmark for Superdome and Oracle9i.

Storage
Compaq Enterprise Storage, Open SAN
In August, Compaq put out a release touting reports from IDC and Gartner that indicate the company is the leader in many storage markets. Compaq led last year in disk storage systems shipped, disk storage system revenue and other categories. In September, the company unveiled new storage-service bundles, a new tape-library product and pretested, entry-level SAN configurations.

HP SureStore Solutions
HP's SureStore product line includes tape systems, recordable DVD media, software, appliances, NAS solutions and other products. Both HP and Compaq, however, trail EMC, Veritas, IBM/Tivoli,

Computer Associates and others in storage management software, according to Gartner Dataquest.