Compaq's Pfeiffer Unveils New E-Business Initiative
Compaq president and CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer unveiled an electronic business strategy to support what the company terms "NonStop eBusiness."
HOUSTON -- In a keynote address delivered at Compaq Computer Corp.'s Innovate Forum held here April 13, Compaq president and CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer unveiled an electronic business strategy to support what the company terms "NonStop eBusiness."
The initiative focuses on helping customers increase the availability and uptime of their e-business sites. The program is said to include all of Compaq's disparate operating systems, including OpenVMS, Tru64 Unix and the Tandem NSK non-stop operating system, as well as Windows NT.
"The Internet will be an integral part of virtually everything you do," Pfeiffer observed. "In the 24x7x365 world of the Internet, downtime is not an option."
John Rose, senior vice president and group manager of Compaq's enterprise computing group, says that for NT users, the heart of the initiative will be to build on last September's Compaq-Microsoft Corp. alliance to boost Windows NT/2000 reliability and availability. In that announcement, Compaq and Microsoft promised that high-availability technologies from the Tandem NSK operating system and OpenVMS would be integrated into future versions of Windows technology, including the Windows 2000 release and beyond. "Those technologies and capabilities we acquired with Tandem -- a lot of that [reliability] capability is in the hardening of the operating systems, and in the database," Rose says.
One issue Compaq must address is how to differentiate itself from e-business initiatives from competitors such as IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. Rose says, "We provide complete solutions of products and systems today for various elements of customers' e-businesses. One of the other key differentiators is we're taking the technology and know-how and driving it on a broader scale to industry standards." Rose contends that driving Tandem NKS and OpenVMS technology into NT accomplishes that goal. "That's a different strategy than IBM or HP. It's very much driving industry standards, and making it more cost effective."