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To: hlpinout who wrote (94153)	12/11/2001 6:22:09 PM
From: hlpinout	Respond to of 97611

Capellas 'Completely Behind' Merger With HP By Steven Burke, CRN New York 4:51 PM EST Tues., Dec. 11, 2001 Compaq Computer Chairman and CEO Michael Capellas said Tuesday he "absolutely supports" his company's proposed union with Hewlett-Packard. Capellas disputed a published report implying that an e-mail he sent to 67,000 Compaq employees over the weekend indicated that his support for the deal is waning. "If anybody is questioning that, let there be no doubt I am completely behind it," he told several hundred Internet World attendees here during a keynote speech. In the e-mail memo, posted on Compaq's Web site, Capellas wrote: "Whether we are part of the new HP or a stand-alone company, I am confident in our ability to achieve [our objectives]." Questions about the future of the HP-Compaq merger heightened over the weekend after the board of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation--HP's largest single shareholder, with just over 10 percent of HP's outstanding stock--said late Friday it would oppose the deal. "So what is all this talk about plan B?" Capellas asked rhetorically in his keynote. "You would expect us to have a business plan that is ongoing. That would seem to be, quite frankly, what I would call normal responsibility. You would expect the business planning process to continue. We have a very clear strategy, and we have taken steps to continue to execute that." At the heart of the merger is the ability to build up the new company's services organization, Capellas said. The combined HP-Compaq would have 65,000 services employees, making it the No. 3 services company in the world. Compaq currently has about 38,000 services employees, making it No. 9 in the world, he said. "The merger was all about taking all of the great capabilities that Compaq had and creating a really new form of delivery, with a complete solution and road map," Capellas said at Internet World, adding that the deal is built on "extending the enterprise to a full footprint." "If you think about the combined company, [it's about] fault-tolerant computing, supercomputing, application servers, the ability to do content management over the Web, distributed SANs and high-end storage," he said. "There is probably no other company, collectively, that can offer all of those." Capellas also said the merger would achieve "great economies of scale" and boost shareholder value via higher earnings per share. "The merger, I still think, absolutely makes sense in terms of servicing the market in serving customers, and we are still behind it," he said. Capellas didn't take questions from reporters after his speech.

To: hlpinout who wrote (94153)	12/11/2001 6:22:56 PM
From: hlpinout	Respond to of 97611

Fiorina Vows To Push Through Compaq Merger Internal memo says institutional shareholders could bring enough votes By Craig Zarley, CRN 4:18 PM EST Tues., Dec. 11, 2001 Hewlett-Packard Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina vowed to pursue her company's proposed merger with Compaq Computer and said the agreement won't be derailed by the Hewlett and Packard family foundations' decisions not to support the deal. "While this [the Packard Foundation vote] was a disappointment, it does not lessen our desire as a company to proceed full speed ahead with the merger," Fiorina said in an internal memo sent to HP employees on Monday. "Our board of directors and our management team believe it is our responsibility to protect and secure this company's future." Fiorina, who was in New York on Tuesday to make her case for the merger to HP institutional shareholders, said she would muster enough votes to win approval for merger. "Despite the decision by the Packard Foundation and the earlier actions by Walter Hewlett and David Woodley Packard, we intend to stay the course and pursue a successful shareowner vote," she said in the memo. "The family foundations, trusts and their individual holdings account for only about 18 percent of the shares outstanding. We only need a simple majority of shares voted for the deal to be approved by our shareowners--which include holdings by many large institutional firms--and we believe this is achievable. This is a long process, and we are only in the early stages." Some institutional shareholders--including Institutional Shareholder Services, the consulting firm retained by some HP shareholders--said they would wait for the final proxy statement before reaching a final decision on the merger. An HP spokeswoman said the final proxy statement wouldn't be filed until January at the earliest. In the memo, Fiorina also issued a challenge to HP employees. "Delivering consistent results will silence some of our critics while we redouble our efforts to communicate the benefits of the merger to our shareowners and to you."

To: hlpinout who wrote (94153)	12/11/2001 6:30:23 PM
From: hlpinout	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Oh Baby! Who's the Biggest of Them All? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Story Filed: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 5:20 PM EST Johannesburg, Dec 11, 2001 (ITWeb/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) -- IBM's ASCI White still rules the supercomputer lists, according to the latest Top500 supercomputer list released earlier this month. The Top500 list is published by the universities of Mannheim and Tennessee. The list was first published in June 1993 and is compiled with the help of computer scientists, manufacturers, the Internet community and high-performance computer experts. The 18th version of the list, which is released twice a year, puts IBM's 8192-copper processor monster on top for the third time in a row. The ASCI White computer is the size of two basketball courts and is used by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory for nuclear research. In second place is the 3024-processor Compaq Alphaserver SC used by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Centre. IBM takes two other places in the top five, including its ASCI Blue supercomputer also used by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Despite dominating the top rungs of the Top500 list, IBM's position is not as secure on other lists, in particular a new list released by the International Data Corporation (IDC) earlier this month. The new IDC list instead ranks the Pittsburgh Compaq Alphaserver at number one with ASCI White taking up second position. The IDC says the new list better reflects real-world computing scenarios and uses a number of new criteria for selection, including the Spec FP benchmark as well as the Stream measurement of data transfer. The IDC list, however, still includes the Linpack measurement - the standard on which the Top500 lists is built. While the Top500 list is dominated by 241 US-based machines, with Europe in second place at 162, Japan is a significant third place with 57 of the 500 based in the country. South-East Asia follows with 25 followed by South America (with eight), Australia (5) and the Middle East (2). Vendor-wise, IBM and HP account for almost half of the total supercomputers in the market with IBM largely dominating the high-end and HP selling significant quantities into the "lower" end. Cray, traditional maker of supercomputers, only has 39 listings in the Top500, although on the new IDC listing the company dominates with almost double the listings than those attributed to IBM. Cray also came out tops on the "enterprise computers" section of the IDC list for computers costing $1 million or more. The $250 000 to $1 million market was topped by SGI with HP heading the sub-$250 000 list. Sun Microsystems lost significant ground over the past year on the supercomputer front with only 30 listings on the latest Top500, compared with 90 listings on last year's list. Other losers include IBM, which is down from 215 to 160 listed systems, and SGI, down from 67 to 40. The big winner on this year's Top500 list is HP with more than 150 listed systems, largely in the lower end of the list. by Alastair Otter Copyright ITWeb. Distributed by All Africa Global Media(AllAfrica.com)

To: hlpinout who wrote (94153)	12/11/2001 6:38:52 PM
From: hlpinout	Respond to of 97611

From Infoworld -- Capellas says Compaq will not perish without HP By Dan Neel , Martin LaMonica , and Marc Ferranti: December 11, 2001 12:36 pm PT update NEW YORK -- Compaq CEO Michael Capellas held a mock interview with himself Tuesday here at Internet World Fall 2001, addressing a widely publicized memo he sent to all Compaq employees regarding the pending merger with Hewlett-Packard. Capellas stated emphatically that he fully supported the megamerger, but that the company also has a contingency plan in case the merger does not go through. "Plan B says, 'obviously, as anyone would expect, we have to have a business plan that is ongoing, which is quite frankly normal ... it's a question of common sense," Capellas said in response to a question he asked himself concerning his reasons for the memo. Capellas, who sent the memo last weekend to the company's 67,000 employees, called it a regular communication and, simply, "an update." "That's about as stealthy as you can get, isn't it? A memo to 67,000 employees," joked Capellas. "I somehow knew it would become public." "Let me be very clear that I support the merger. Let there be no doubt," Capellas replied to another question from himself. In the memo, Capellas wrote that he still supports the deal with HP, but that Compaq is also well positioned to on its own meet the goals that the merger is supposed to help the company achieve. Those goals are to extend Compaq's capacity to provide products and services to large corporations, to turn Compaq into a larger service provider able to compete head-to-head against IBM's Global Services division, and to improve the bottom line of Compaq's PC business while staying on top of innovation in new technology areas. The memo was sent in response to a decision Friday by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to oppose the merger, a stock swap deal which was valued at $25 billion when first announced. The foundation owns a 10.4 percent stake in HP and is considered by many to hold the swing vote in the merger. During the balance of the keynote Tuesday, Capellas said that a combination of product over-capacity, hardware commoditization, changing buying patterns, and a weakness in telecoms and dot-coms had brought the Internet to another change in its architecture, a change Capellas said "was more evolutionary than revolutionary." Optimistic of the future, Capellas said that the next driver of Internet growth will the pervasive use of rich audio and video content, and that such content would be delivered over much of the existing Internet infrastructure. "We built all these current applications to handle data; now we need to build it to handle content. It won't be a new architecture, it will be a new content delivery system," said Capellas. Capellas said Compaq's Adaptive Infrastructure initiative is a key example of a next-generation content delivery system. Recently announced with Compaq's server blade strategy, the Adaptive Infrastructure Strategy (AIS) calls for the addition of advanced failover and clustering technology, remote system management, self-healing technology for server hardware, and system automation. "The hype is gone [from the Internet]," Capellas said. "Our optimism about this stuff has become real." Attendees appeared to think that Capellas' assertions about latent demand building up in the economy, and his defense of "Plan B," in case the merger with HP falls through, made sense. "It's like the military -- you're an idiot if you don't have some sort of backup plan in place," said Peter Johnson, an Internet marketing consultant who runs the SiteCom Strategies constancy in Bronxville, N.Y. "I don't think the fact that he sent some sort of memo to his employees means that he has lost faith in the merger, although without the backing of the [Hewlett and Packard] families, it could be a blow to its chances of success." Johnson also agrees that there is latent demand for IT building up this year. "IT managers were putting some plans on hold in the second and third quarters due to the economy and with the terrorist attacks, that was a further reason or excuse to hold off a little more. But they're getting ready to tee off projects, and I think we'll see demand for IT pickup as these projects get off the ground in the middle of 2002 -- you can't put necessary projects on hold forever," he said. Other attendees said the keynote was business as usual. "Of course [Capellas] is going to put the corporate spin on [the merger]," said Rick Whitney, director of Web design and development at Distance Learning in New York. "These [mergers] happen all the time and sometimes they fall through; the idea of what he was saying about a backup plan could just be more spin control." If the decision to abandon the merger plans is made, it will come "in another few weeks," according to Thomas Perkins, a member of Compaq's board of directors, cited in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. "If it drags on for months and months and months, it's not good for both companies," he said. Compaq could ask for a preliminary tally of HP shareholders that support the merger and insist on canceling the deal if HP can't show it has enough votes, The Wall Street Journal wrote Tuesday, quoting an unidentified source close to the Compaq board. Dan Neel is an InfoWorld senior writer. Martin LaMonica is an InfoWorld executive editor. Marc Ferranti is managing editor of the IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate. Joris Evers contributed to this report.

To: hlpinout who wrote (94153)	12/11/2001 6:47:40 PM
From: hlpinout	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Compaq Canada Improves Customer Service Performance With Blue Pumpkin -- Workforce Optimization Helps Contact Centers Make More Out Of Less - Call Abandonment Rate Down By 65%, Expenses Down By 15%, Gross Margins Up Nearly 20% -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Story Filed: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 12:12 PM EST SUNNYVALE, CA, Dec 11, 2001 (INTERNET WIRE via COMTEX) -- Blue Pumpkin, an industry leader in enterprise workforce optimization solutions, and Compaq Canada Corp. announced significant improvements in Compaq Canada's contact center performance from using Blue Pumpkin's workforce optimization technology. Compaq Canada Consumer Helpdesk - previously named "Call Center of the Year" by industry media in recent years - selected Blue Pumpkin last year to optimize its workforce processes even further and saw an immediate increase in customer service performance and, correspondingly, in financial returns. In just the first quarter of this year, Compaq Canada experienced the following performance and productivity improvements: - Call abandonment rate decreased 65.3% - Average hold time decreased 57.3% - Net service levels increased 16.3% - Operational expenses decreased 15% - Point of sale revenue per agent increased by 17% - Gross margins increased 18%. "We were happy to help Compaq Canada raise the bar on customer service and have always been confident in our ability to provide an outstanding return-on-investment," said Doron Aspitz, co-founder and CEO of Blue Pumpkin. "The company was already at the top of its game, but Blue Pumpkin uncovered new ways for their contact centers to do more with less. This is especially important given tighter staffing and essential for greater profitability." Blue Pumpkin directly impacts customer service and profitability by optimizing all the underlying workforce-related processes. Using its Director-Enterprise workforce optimization solution, Compaq Canada Consumer Helpdesk was able to more accurately forecast staffing needs, provide greater flexibility in scheduling, and quickly explore many "what-if" scenarios easily without touching live data. Blue Pumpkin also provides benefits in other areas such as hiring, training, performance evaluation, budgeting and more. Its solutions ensure that the right person with the right knowledge is ready to help the customer at the right time. "We are extremely pleased with early results from using Blue Pumpkin," said Reg Schade, vice president of Global Services for Compaq Canada. "It validates Compaq Canada's commitment to our customers and, by implementing the best workforce optimization technology, we are able to provide them even greater support. It also makes economic sense as well, since Blue Pumpkin more than pays for itself through operational cost-savings and repeat business from greater customer loyalty." Compaq Canada and Blue Pumpkin both were awarded a 2001 eCustomer World Golden Award, sponsored by Microsoft Canada Co., recently for this particular engagement. The awards celebrated world-class e-business solutions and innovation in the Canadian marketplace. About Blue Pumpkin Blue Pumpkin is at the forefront of a new wave of enterprise software applications and services for businesses that want to achieve higher levels of employee and customer satisfaction resulting in increased revenue. Blue Pumpkin's multi-channel workforce optimization software helps businesses plan, execute, and evaluate strategies that focus on the quality of personal interactions by helping them make the most of their most critical resource: their people. Blue Pumpkin's subsidiary Coleman Consulting provides best practices consulting for workforce optimization. Blue Pumpkin has more than 700 customers in a wide range of industries. Customers include ADP, Apple Computer, Airborne Express, AOL/CompuServe Europe, AT&T, Kaiser Permanente, KitchenAid, TimeWarner Cable, and Verizon. For more information about Blue Pumpkin and its products, please visit www.bluepumpkin.com. About Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation, a Fortune Global 100 company, is a leading global provider of technology and solutions. Compaq designs, develops, manufactures, and markets hardware, software, solutions, and services, including industry-leading enterprise computing solutions, fault-tolerant business-critical solutions, and communications products, commercial desktop and portable products, and consumer PCs that are sold in more than 200 countries. With headquarters and distribution facilities in Richmond Hill, Compaq Canada Corporation has 3,800 employees located in 41 offices across Canada, including Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, London, Mississauga, Markham, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, Moncton, Halifax and St. John's. With the exception of its larger scale technologies and services, Compaq products and services are sold and supported through a network of more than 3,800 marketing partners across the country. Copyright 2001 Blue Pumpkin Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Blue Pumpkin is a registered trademark of Blue Pumpkin Software, Inc. Blue Pumpkin Software and the Blue Pumpkin logo are trademarks of Blue Pumpkin Software, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

To: hlpinout who wrote (94153)	12/11/2001 6:51:50 PM
From: hlpinout	Respond to of 97611

An audio one might want to listen to. The link will take you to a listing of Compaq news and if you look down you will find the item. I can't post a direct link to the audio so click on "Listen" next to the description. -- tradingday.com Compaq's Capellas: Industry and Hewlett-Packard Merger New York, Dec. 11, 2001 (Bloomberg) -- Michael Capellas, chief executive officer of Compaq Computer Corp., speaks about the evolution of computer industry and customer trends, growth outlook and his continued support of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s proposed purchase of Compaq. He speaks in a keynote address at the Internet World Fall 2001 conference. 02:35 Industry conditions; market trends and customer demand 01:51 Shifts in e-business and collaboration trends 03:33 "It is really content that is leading commerce." 02:51 Multimedia growth; data distribution and personalization 06:22 Internet music; advances in next-generation supercomputers 02:16 Customer challenges; need for adaptive infrastructure 00:49 Need for virtual and centralized data control 04:52 Capellas shows an infrastructure demonstration video. 03:03 Customer adoption; evolution of home, work Internet access 08:50 Compaq's Brant Jones discusses wireless, Bluetooth unit 02:56 Relationship with Starbucks and Allscripts Healthcare 05:11 Industry outlook and support for Hewlett-Packard merger Running time 45:09.