Compaq Says Keeps Market Share In Wake of HP Merger

"In quarter one, we kept the momentum going," says Peter Blackmore, Compaq's executive vice president of sales and services. "Our competitors may claim things, but we've maintained our position."

Compaq's U.S. rival Sun Microsystems again said last week that it, as well as peers Dell and IBM, stand to benefit from Compaq and HP's focus on integrating the two firms.

Blackmore, speaking from a Compaq customers and partners gathering in Lisbon, Portugal, said rivals have been calling a victory since H-P and Compaq announced merger talks in September last year. Nothing had yet materialised, he says.

Blackmore also says the market for information technology spending had stabilized and the company is now looking for growth.

"It's not a situation that is declining," he says. "[The market has stabilized now. We're beginning to look for growth in certain areas. The big conundrum is when we'll see an uptick in the market."

While most companies, including Compaq, hope for a modest recovery in the second half of this year, industry research group Gartner Dataquest said two weeks ago that technology spending by large European companies was not expected to really pick up before the second half of 2003.

Growth this year is set to be around 4 or 5 percent, Garter predicted, half of the ten-year average.

If Compaq's takeover by Hewlett-Packard is agreed in a few weeks time--preliminary estimates from a shareholder vote three weeks ago showed a small majority in favour of the acquisition--Blackmore will be in charge of HP and Compaq's combined enterprise computing activities.

Areas he identified as strong relative to the slow average IT spending budgets are storage, industry standards such as Intel-Microsoft products, high-performance computing in the wake of Sept.11, software, and products that enable inter-operability between systems and outsourcing.

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