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

To: hlpinout who wrote (89509)	2/5/2001 9:31:41 PM
From: Elwood P. Dowd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Compaq Acquisitions Finally Yield High-End Systems 5/05/01 Vendor targets a dozen vertical markets with integrated hardware-software packages By Martin J. Garvey (mgarvey@cmp.com) The first fruits of the 3-year-old marriage of Compaq, Digital Equipment, and Tandem will be unveiled this week when Compaq rolls out hardware-software packages customized for vertical markets and designed to deliver real-time data to users' desktops. Compaq plans to deliver its Zero Latency Enterprise systems for the retail, finance, and telecom industries this week; systems for entertainment, travel, utilities, and six other markets are planned for later this year. Pricing for the high-end systems will start at $10 million for hardware and storage; additional charges for software depend on the applications. The systems will include software from several partners, including Acxiom customer-information applications, MicroStrategy business-intelligence analytical software, Oracle databases, and SAS Institute data-mining software. All the software partners will work to integrate the applications and speed data delivery, including information residing in disparate legacy systems. Zero Latency Enterprise packages initially will run on NonStop Himalaya servers Compaq gained through the Tandem acquisition. This summer, they'll run on AlphaServer clusters developed by Digital. The Himalaya and AlphaServer's will be the main transaction processing engines. Compaq's Tru64 Unix servers and ProLiant Windows NT/2000 servers will be part of the packages and handle databases and apps. By integrating applications and the high-availability hardware, Zero Latency Enterprise can cut up to 40% from the time, money, and resources companies would need to do the installation and integration themselves, says Gartner analyst Roy Schulte. "Every project comes with a lot of risk. Compaq's ZLEs can reduce the risk of failure," he says. Sabre Inc. in Fort Worth, Texas, the world's largest airline reservation system, is counting on ZLE to help eliminate the need for new mainframes. Chief technology officer Craig Murphy says Sabre uses 30-year-old mainframe-based Transaction Processing Facility software from IBM to handle 9,200 transactions per second. He's deploying new systems from Hewlett-Packard, NCR, and Sun Microsystems, along with Compaq's ZLE, in hopes of cutting operating costs in half over five years. "It's no sure thing," says Murphy, who has tested the system. "But we believe Compaq can operate reliably with good scalability in important areas and deliver improved capabilities and reduced cost of ownership." He plans to deploy the Compaq systems later this year to handle flight and ticket availability and customer profile data, which need to be updated constantly. Target Corp. also plans to deploy ZLE. The Minneapolis chain of more than 1,200 stores needs additional computing power to supplement the more than 12,000 Mips of mainframe capacity it outsources to IBM. CIO Paul Singer says Target will use a ZLE Himalaya server to handle a new customer-relationship application that requires real-time information. "A hundred years ago when my grandmother went into the store, the clerk knew she wanted five pounds of flour this week. He had intimate knowledge of what she needed," Singer says. "With ZLE, we hope to duplicate that relationship." Singer says today's competitive environment requires systems that can analyze and process data, especially information involving customers, faster than ever. He says ZLE will give his service personnel a customer's entire buying history at their fingertips when the customer calls with a question about his or her credit card. "Before, sales and credit had separate sources of information, and a batch process to update them could take days," Singer says. "Our belief is that we can skip a generation, bypass batch processing, and jump to real time." Bruce Carroll, corporate marketing leader at Acxiom, a software partner of Compaq, says businesses can increase sales by making up-to-date information available to all employees. "These high-speed systems can get information into the workers' hands in real time, and a company could see sales increase 6% to 10%," he says. Gartner's Schulte says the ZLE systems will appeal to mainframe users that need to process large amounts of transactions quickly. "You don't have a lot of choices out there," he says. "Compaq's ZLE can scale to handle very large databases and workloads, and a very large number of transactions per second."