Compaq Global Services Hits 2 Million Mark In Exchange 2000 Migrations

The giant services arm of Compaq Computer has migrated 2 million out of the 6 million Exchange users it supports to Exchange 2000, the company said.

Gartner analyst Joyce Graff estimates that just 5 percent of the Exchange installed base is on the latest iteration of the e-mail product, so Compaq is somewhat ahead of the curve.

Mail migrations are tricky business and take considerable planning and expertise, said Rick Fricchione, vice president of Compaq Global Services. Many of the Exchange 2000 moves were precipitated by customers wanting to consolidate servers, he said.

"For a 75,000-seat company, you might have had 400 Exchange Servers in 1998. Now you'd have 30 to 50 servers. You combine [the mail migration with server consolidation to reduce the cost of operations and cost per mailbox," Fricchione said.

Another driving force has been the business climate in the past few years. "If I said mergers and acquisition activity in the past has not driven a lot of this work, I'd be lying," he said.

Consolidating various businesses with their own mail, directories and server infrastructures is difficult, integrators said. Exchange 2000 and Active Directory have taken some of the complexity out of mail consolidation, Fricchione said. "But, let's be honest, taking X.500 directories, Microsoft directories and slamming them together and taking another directory populated by a PeopleSoft human resources application and another self-service system that feeds into Novell, it's just hard."

Compaq Global Services, he maintains, has built tools for integrating these directories under the covers so the day a merger deal closes "the directories at the user interface level are fully integrated."

"We have tools that give the impression of an integrated enterprise directory but they're actually synchronizing the directories underneath,that drives a one-company look," he said.

While directory and e-mail integration can take 60 to 120 days, an integrator can ease the pain with LDAP tools or meta directory tools, he added.

A lot of that integration work is now going on in preparation for the expected closing of the merger with Hewlett-Packard, he said.