INDUSTRY

By Steve Fisher, Editor in Chief -- The proverbial “i’s” have been dotted and the “t’s” crossed in the HP/Compaq mega-merger. With final approval announced last Friday, and the company’s first day trading under its new NYSE symbol (HPQ) Monday, HP continued moving forward with a press event today to properly introduce the public to “The New HP.” The key themes were “We are ready. We are focused.” “We have made a whole series of decisions and I want to share at a high level what some of those are because they not only demonstrate I think that we are ready to launch this company and launch this business, but they also represent candidly that we have already fulfilled our first set of commitments,” said Carly Fiorina Chairman and CEO. “Specifically we indicated that looking at our new company from the customer in, we indicated that within 30 days of announcing the launch of this company that we would have our product line roadmaps for all of our products laid out for three years, that we would have our go-to-market structures defined, that we would have our account teams in place. And instead of those things being done thirty days from now, we in fact have announced them today.” In addition the online shopping “experiences” for both companies have been integrated into a new and improved www.hp.com and it is live as of today in multiple languages in nine countries around the world. By the 60-day mark, www.hp.com will be fully deployed in all countries where legally permissible The company's business and functional organizations are reportedly in place, with management teams named three layers deep, including regional and country managers and the top 100 corporate account managers. Plans for an additional management layer are also moving forward. And as Fiorina stated above, detailed product roadmaps are complete, including customer support and migration plans. In addition, the company's go-to-market model for each customer segment -- consumers to small- and medium-sized businesses to large enterprises -- is defined and financial targets have been identified with accountability established. Rather than go into all of HP's plans I thought I'd focus on a couple of special interest to the HPC community. HP-UX will continue to be the long-term, strategic UNIX platform for the new HP. Features of Tru64 UNIX however, (clustering and file systems) will be integrated into HP-UX over time. HP also will deliver on the previously announced OpenVMS roadmap, including the port to Itanium. HP will follow the previously published roadmaps for both PA-RISC and AlphaServer systems. PA-RISC servers will be targeted at all new business opportunities as well as the existing installed base; AlphaServers will be primarily focused on their installed base and high-performance technical computing. The NonStop server family from Compaq will remain and will now be referred to as the HP NonStop Server. ProLiant servers will become HP's IA-32 server offering, along with the ProLiant blade server architecture for the data center and the HP's Powerbar blade family that has been optimized for the telecommunications market. Supercomputing Online will deliver more news on the new HP's high performance computing and networking plans as they become available. Of note during the press event was the announcement that the two companies (now one) have over the past ninety days racked up new contracts with an aggregate value of just over $5 billion. Congrats to the new HP. Fiorina actually opened her remarks with the following quote which I think works just as well as a closing quote, “We have spent literally a million plus person-hours planning the integration of these two companies. It has taken the work, effort and devotion of thousands of people from both pre-merger Compaq and pre-merger HP, and thanks to all of that hard work we are today ready to execute."