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

To: hlpinout who wrote (88958)	1/19/2001 7:32:51 PM
From: hlpinout	Respond to of 97611

RUMORS, TRUTH & INNUENDO ShadowRAM By ShadowRAM, CRN 1:47 PM EST Fri., Jan. 19, 2001 ANALYST'S CONSOLIDATION THEORIES MAKE FOR STRANGE BEDFELLOWS COMPAQ'S MICHAEL CAPELLAS IS A HALF-MARATHON MAN AL FRANKEN IS A HIT AT LOTUSPHERE, SECOND ONLY TO NEW NOTES FEATURE People in New York should start drinking only bottled water. That's because "it must be something in the water" is the only explanation we can come up with for a report that came out last week authored by Andrew Neff, senior managing director and PC hardware analyst at Bear Stearns. Neff, who's no slouch as an analyst, said there's over- capacity in the PC market and suggested consolidation as a way to improve profitability in the sector. He then offered some possible corporate strategies. Among them, Dell Computer should buy either IBM's PC business or Gateway. OK so far. But then he suggested Hewlett-Packard should buy Compaq, and that Apple should drop PowerPC and pick up Intel. If those two happen, we'll buy Neff a drink. Jim Milton, Compaq's vice president and general manager of North America, has got storage religion. Milton urged nearly 1,000 solution providers attending the ENSA@Work 2001 Storage Conference in New Orleans last week to partner with Compaq, instead of the "Evil Machine Company," because Compaq puts "its best minds in storage." He then confessed the first time he ever heard the word "petabyte" mentioned in relation to a SAN was during a visit to the Church of Latter Day Saints in Salt Lake City. Church officials were studying better ways to store and maintain their genealogical database. Milton thought it best not to ask church elders what a petabyte was. We can't shed any light on the matter either, except to note that it's an animal with a lot of zeros on the end. As most readers know, journalists have never been accused of being mathematicians. But Milton did give us some numbers we do understand. "Partnering is in our DNA," he said, giving these numbers to back up his statement: In North Amer-ica last year, 90 percent of Compaq's consumer business, 65 percent of its commercial PC business, 55 percent of its Alpha business, 9 percent of its Tandem/Himalaya business, 80 percent of its Proliant servers and 70 percent of its storage business went through solution providers. As a quid-pro-quo gesture, Milton teased his keynote audience with a little stock tip. "Compaq's stock is a really, really, really" good buy right now, he told the crowd. Sometimes we're only half right. We reported last month that Compaq Chairman and CEO Michael Capellas planned to run the Houston Marathon, a Compaq-sponsored event. Well, the results from the Jan. 14 race are in, and Capellas posted a time of 1:58.08. Before you go rushing to rewrite the marathon records book, however, please note that he only ran the second half of the 26-mile race. Capellas teamed up with his brother George, who ran the first half in 1:52. Still, Michael didn't do too bad for a 46-year-old guy who hasn't exercised much over the past 10 years. Oh, by the way, Capellas lost 45 pounds during his crash training course for the event. Hire comic Al Franken to host a corporate event, and you're almost sure to get laughs. But when Lotus tapped Franken to emcee its opening session at Lotusphere last week, some Lotus folks were sweating out audience reaction to a couple of his remarks. They were particularly concerned about references the former "Saturday Night Live" writer made to the Monica Lewinsky affair and to former Vice President Al Gore's celebrated stiffness. But the 8 a.m. Lotusphere crowd laughed harder at that than anything else at the conference. And the only thing they applauded louder than Franken was news that in the next release of Notes, file attachments can be truncated in the "reply" function of an e-mail.