El -
I had a conversation some weeks ago with one of the marketing people in the network products division. He said at that time that CPQ was consolidating a number of operations as a part of the DEC integration. His view was that CPQ was going to be organizing more tightly around customer segments. The product segmentation which exists today (consumer, desktop, enterprise, and within enterprise the Tandem, Alpha, Intel server, workstation, networking etc) was getting in the way of some of the customer satisfaction issues and also making the creation of complete enterprise solutions more difficult, since product offerings had to be pulled together across a number of divisions.
I think this is part of the 'normandy' project but I don't really know, since no one will talk about 'normandy' beyond vague hints. I do know that this was expected, that there will be more product group realignments early next year, and that this does not reflect much on current CPQ business. The fact that CPQ inherited a number of additional networking products and deals with DEC probably contributed to the network reorganization being ahead of some of the other stuff. So far I am pleased, looks like CPQ is doing some year-end housekeeping and tightening up operations. |
