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

To: The Duke of URL© who wrote (93199)	9/25/2001 9:36:02 AM
From: Elwood P. Dowd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Nextira and Compaq Computer Corp. by: texas_red64 Long-Term Sentiment: Strong Buy 09/25/01 09:05 am Msg: 256803 of 256806 2 local technology firms provided immediate help By TOM FOWLER Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle While much of the country stood stunned as terrorists launched their attacks two weeks ago today, at least two Houston tech companies were busy with recovery efforts. Within an hour of the attacks, voice and data network developer Nextira and Compaq Computer Corp. were helping dozens of customers whose offices and equipment were destroyed. Both companies had employees stationed in the areas beforehand, but later sent dozens more. Nextira, a 6,000-employee firm based in Houston, had a phone switch serving thousands of customer phone lines in one of the World Trade Center towers, while clients such as Nasdaq were forced to evacuate their buildings and leave behind much of their communications systems. Another Nextira customer, the agency that manages the New York City-area tunnels, bridges, airports and shipping ports -- the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey -- had its offices in the South Tower destroyed, with six employees confirmed dead and as many as 68 missing. Nextira started gathering equipment and workers in a Connecticut office the morning of the attack and began work shortly after. "The Transit Authority had to redeploy to new facilities and expand existing ones to get their full communications back up and running," said Bob Wentworth, chief executive officer and president of Nextira. "In about 18 hours, our people completed what would normally be a three-week project to restore the city's command and control center." The company also helped investment bank Merrill Lynch restore its phone service in new locations after the company lost offices in the World Trade Center complex, and later that week restored voice and data communications for Nasdaq in three different downtown locations. "We still have a technician running around in the depths of the American Stock Exchange building who has had to evacuate several times while doing his work," Wentworth said. Compaq has also been in the thick of business recovery efforts, working with more than 30 businesses that were in the World Trade Center. The company has been less forthright about details, however, because of customer confidentiality. According to sources outside the company, a major bank that works with Compaq lost its primary and secondary data centers when the towers and surrounding buildings collapsed. Compaq started rebuilding the data centers almost immediately and had the facility running before trading resumed the next week. Compaq was less reticent about its work for the American Red Cross. It provided more than $725,000 worth of servers, personal computers and iPaq handheld computers to the disaster relief organization within the first few days. A group of Houston employees was asked to build from scratch a custom, two-rack set of servers for the Red Cross on the Friday afternoon after the attack. The group designed, built and tested the system within 24 hours and had it in New York by Sunday. Compaq also set up the computer backbone for the Family Registration Web site to help survivors of the attack get information to their families. The company also provided computer kiosks in New York and Washington to let survivors and rescue workers send e-mail to family, and helped the Red Cross set up a storage area network to keep track of data on the missing. Compaq and other tech firms may also see a boost in sales after the attacks, as the hundreds of trade center tenants look to replace lost equipment. According to a partial inventory by research firm the Tower Group, businesses in the complex lost as many as 50,000 trading-desk workstations worth $52,000 each; 34,000 personal computers worth between $2,000 to $6,000 each; 8,000 Intel and 5,000 Unix servers valued at about $370 million; and about $300 million in printers, hubs, data storage and other networking hardware.