Compaq Targets Appliance
Market
(04/13/99, 10:54 a.m. ET)
By James Governor, InformationWeek
Compaq plans to plunge headlong into the
appliance market and sell stripped-down
hardware and software bundles dedicated
to particular applications. The company
recently announced it would sell Web
caching appliances in conjunction with
Novell, but plans to go much further than
that.
Houston-based Compaq is developing a file-serving
appliance that will compete against a similar box from
NetworkAppliance and Dell, and many more
appliances are in the pipeline. "We're going to do this
for a range of applications," said John Young,
Compaq's director of appliance and communication
servers. "Appliances can offer performance gains and
simplified management over general servers."
He said Compaq is going further than Round Rock,
Texas-based Dell by building a framework for
dedicated application appliances using its
InsightManager tool set, which would offer better
integration and management capabilities between
different boxes. The first appliances under development
are for Web caching and file serving. But also "under
investigation" are dedicated devices for security,
database, telecommunications, Internet serving, and
mail and messaging.
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