March 14, 2002 03:13
HP, Compaq Have Roots Together in San Jose, Calif.
By Jennifer Files, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.
Mar. 14--A sign labeled "Hewlett-Packard Dwy" marks the Cupertino road that hundreds of Compaq workers take each day to enter the Houston company's largest Northern California campus.
For years, HP and Compaq Computer have been such close neighbors in Cupertino that their facilities appear almost to be a unified campus, with HP's blue signs facing Compaq's red ones in front of low-slung glass and concrete buildings.
HP's and Compaq's operations in Silicon Valley have similar roots and similar ways of doing business -- in many ways, more natural ties than the bonds between Compaq's Houston headquarters and its 2,500 workers in the Bay Area.
Much has been made of the potential culture clash that could surface if the two computer giants merge. But for Silicon Valley employees of the two companies, the combination, which shareholders will vote on next week, would be more like a marriage between a hometown boy and the girl next door.
"We've lived across the street from Hewlett-Packard for the entire 27 years of our existence," said Pauline Nist, vice president and general manager of Compaq's "nonstop division," which was a separate company called Tandem Computers until Compaq bought it five years ago.
"People go to the same churches; their kids go to the same schools. We've exchanged employees over the years. It's not like we're strangers."
Tandem in fact was founded by former HP executives.
A $22 billion merger -- not to mention the 15,000 planned layoffs once the deal closes -- would make any employee apprehensive, but Compaq's Silicon Valley workers have some reason to feel sanguine.
Local research divisions stemming from the former Digital Equipment, which Compaq acquired in 1998, strained to find a place within a company whose traditional personal computer business didn't emphasize long-term research projects. They would have a much more obvious home within HP, where the culture of research is strong and the corporate slogan is "invent."
And since announcing in September plans to buy Compaq, HP executives have gone out of their way to emphasize that they plan to keep the former Tandem, which builds servers for business-critical applications for networks -- such as ATMs, airline reservation systems and e-mail applications -- where downtime is unacceptable. The nonstop division employs about 1,500 in Cupertino, with a few hundred more in a Fremont factory.
"The people here are a lot less nervous" than other Compaq workers, said Nist. "I think there was a lot more nervousness when Compaq acquired us. They were in Houston. We didn't know anything about them."
While it has been one of Houston's most high-profile companies, Compaq is a relatively new brand name in Silicon Valley. The local businesses it took over had long-established cultures that were hard to change.
Tandem founder Jimmy Treybig was a former HP executive whose profile in his day was as high as current HP CEO Carly Forina's is today. A hands-on, people-loving manager who says he still dreams about Tandem, Treybig brought corporate sabbaticals and weekly beer busts -- hallmarks of Silicon Valley corporate culture.
Compaq cut out sabbaticals and curtailed regional happy hours to once a quarter, but at a deeper level, Tandem's Silicon Valley culture still survives.
Treybig recalls a recent meeting with 15 workers from the Compaq operations that stem from Tandem. "I knew 12 of them really good, for 20 years. The point is that people have stayed around."
"The culture of Tandem and HP were very much alike," says Treybig, now a venture capitalist in Austin. "It's still very strong."
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