Compaq says won many health care deals despite merger
By Peter Henderson
SAN FRANCISCO, March 27 (Reuters) - The expected chief of high-end computing at the merged Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HWP - news) and Compaq Computer Corp. (NYSE:CPQ - news) said on Wednesday that recent health care industry deals for $300 million showed customers wanted the one-stop technology shopping promised by the merged HP.
Compaq was keeping customers and had signed the deals with health care companies since announcing in September plans for the merger, Peter Blackmore, executive vice president of sales and services at Houston, Texas-based Compaq, said in a telephone interview.
``We haven't lost our momentum,'' he said, adding that the deals also proved customers had not abandoned Compaq, despite the impending merger, which spurred a nasty and vocal battle over the companies' future.
Blackmore will take over the high-end computer servers group at HP if the $19 billion merger goes through. HP has said shareholders approved the deal by a slim margin last week, but official certification is expected to take weeks.
The merged company is betting that big customers will choose to buy all their gear from one shop, although analysts have questioned whether corporations with different types of machines running different programs would not use a variety of suppliers.
Compaq said that since the merger was announced it had done about 14 deals for servers and services to health care companies worth some $300 million over three to five years.
Compaq has already announced a number of those deals, which build on the roughly $1.2 billion in North American health care sales that Compaq had previously.
``We see it as very natural that you will have high end Unix, Linux, with a range of operating systems living alongside each other. Almost all customers I go to have a mix of that,'' he said. ``The norm is a mix, and I don't see that changing.''
One new example is a $10 million, 2-year deal with San Diego-based Sharp HealthCare which includes Himalaya mainframe-style servers, Alpha servers running the high-end Unix operating system, Microsoft Windows-based low-end ProLiant servers, Compaq's storage area network and wireless communications.
Other health care customers included the Medical College of Wisconsin, Virginia Commonwealth University's Medical College
of Virginia Hospital, Baptist Memorial Health Care Corp and Cardinal health.
``Increasingly they (customers) want the end-to-end capability, not just Unix, and that enables us in front of the customer to differentiate ourselves enormously from Sun Microsystems(NasdaqNM:SUNW - news), and when we merge, the differentiation gets even broader,'' Blackmore said. |
