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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: paul who wrote (67713)	9/17/1999 1:02:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Paul - re: However what technology unique to Compaq is enabling such rapid growth in the PC Server web server market? I have worked with some customers who made this shift and in a word (well, 2 words) the CPQ advantage was professional services. These customers were first attracted by the much lower cost for expanding web capacity but once into the process, the choice went to CPQ over DELL, HP or even IBM because of clean, low cost professional services capability and deep knowledge of how to make those systems work reliably. These customers had a universally bad experience with Sun on the professional services front - and that reflects what I have regarded as a weak spot in Sun's arsenal for a while. Sun employs a leveraged model for much of its professional services work and at least in the cases where I was involved, the customers regarded those services as overpriced and not top quality. In one case the customer became convinced that the service provider regarded the Sun contract as a "license to steal" by requiring more and more design and redesign work as the system grew. Sun of course was not directly involved in that but CPQ takes the whole responsibility with CPQ employees and CPQ performance guarantees. The surprising thing to me was the poor showing of IBM Global services in these accounts. Without exception, these customers found that IBM proposed a high cost initial study which amounted to work that CPQ did for free as a part of the bid process, then put junior people on the actual work, people who were obviously learning on the job. CPQ, on the other hand, put in engineers and management talent who had done this exact thing several times before and therefore produced an efficient implementation at minimum cost and in minimum time. Even Oracle, which is a big Sun fan, has shifted to CPQ DISA designs for many of the new web farms they are doing.