Compaq's CEO Addresses Industry Questions
Apr 14, 1999 (Tech Web - CMP via COMTEX) -- After his keynote Tuesday at Compaq Computer's Innovate Forum, Compaq president and CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer took questions from the press and analysts centering on the Houston company's new branding message of NonStop E-business Solutions and other strategic initiatives.
Following are highlights of remarks made by Pfeiffer during that session.
Question: Can you discuss your current thinking with respect to spending and how it has been affected by Y2K? And do you believe that there will be a Y2K-related nuclear winter this year with respect to PC spending?
Eckhard Pfeiffer: We hope, nobody knows for sure, that there will not be a nuclear winter. If there is, it is certainly going to affect everybody. Again, we believe there are multiple segments that will not be affected by the Y2K problem. That is consumers. That is medium and small businesses. For them it is as easy as dealing with the remediation of any existing equipment. We see differentiating patterns among the major customers. Some of them say they are going to have a freeze from now until the end of the year. Others say they are going full steam. They are compliant now. They are not stopping altogether. They are investing, installing.
Question: Can you address the integration with Digital Equipment, and where do we stand with that integration?
Pfeiffer: The integration was driven very, very aggressively. We set a major portion to be completed by the end of last year. We achieved that goal in the implementation worldwide ... in the implementation of the service organization, product organization, etc. It is continuing in certain areas in the first quarter and through the second quarter. That was the overall plan to have it completed within a year's time. I'd say with a few exceptions, we are completely on target again. Obviously, the day-to-day integration of all the tens of thousands of people continues on an ongoing basis. More specifically, our field organization for example, is totally integrated. Customers have been assigned their account executives, the service team. All that is completed and the synergies we are seeing are growing day by day.
Question: How will you use the Web to sell your computers and services?
Pfeiffer: I communicated in the presentation that Compaq is today offering products in multiple ways to customers. For each class of customer -- be it consumer, medium/small business, large businesses, global customers -- we have a way to deal with us. Be it through a retail store or through our major [reseller] accounts, sales organization or be it through the Compaq.com website. We are fulfilling today in all categories ... and we are rolling that capability around the globe during 1999.
Question: You said earlier that nobody owns the r-business name. IBM has been using the term for two years now. When did you see the light of day?
Pfeiffer: We have not seen the light of e-business today, let me assure you. I showed you one slide that showed that Compaq is by far the largest installed based Web server, not only in the U.S., but you can expand it pretty much on a global scale. We've been selling ProLiant Web servers, our Alpha Web servers and our Himalaya Web servers on a global scale with roughly reflecting the market opportunity. ...We may have been late in giving it a name, but our efforts have been focused all along on being in the lead, and we are in the lead.
Question: When you look at the recent Shopping.com acquisition and then at your strategy to be the technology behind all these Internet commerce sites, how do your potential partners feel about you competing against them?
Pfeiffer: The way e-commerce on the Internet is working, it's a matter of having an attractive product offering, watching a number of factors, among them the average unit price of your transactions and how you organize logistics. How you gain competitive advantage. We have many programs under way under the original Compaq plan as well as the plan for Shopping.com to be a major e-commerce site on the Internet and have a number of different differentiators that will help us achieve, among other things, helping to drive major traffic to our site which is one of the key factors in doing e-commerce. |
