Compaq Computer CEO and president Eckhard Pfeiffer made a pitch for his company's ascendancy from PC supplier to global enterprise systems provider yesterday to thousands of users attending CA-World.
With the purchase of Tandem Computer last year, and the pending acquisition of Digital, Compaq is poised to offer a complete range of systems, from standards-based PCs to highly scaleable machines based on the Unix and VMS operating systems, Pfeiffer said.
Compaq wants to move forward to apply to high-end systems the PC market principle of offering systems based on industry-accepted standards. This will give users of high-end machines the flexibility of a broad array of interoperable applications, Pfeiffer said.
The idea of packaging up systems on industry-standard components has served Compaq well in the PC and PC server businesses, Pfeiffer noted. He pointed to recently issued market share figures that put Compaq's North American market at 17.3 per cent in the first quarter, up 4.5 points - the biggest jump of any PC maker in the quarter.
For the interconnects, Compaq plans to use Tandem's ServerNet, which offers high-speed data transmission with failover capacity. Also included in the Enterprise 2000 plan is Fibre Channel-based storage.
Within a year, the company plans to release standards-based systems that perform at 200,000 transactions per minute (tpm), and by 2000 the systems should hit 500,000tpm, Pfeiffer said.
But Compaq, recognising users' need for high performance now, plans to continue to support Unix and VMS platforms from Digital, as well as the Digital Alpha chip.
Unix is Compaq's "entry into 64-bit computing," Pfeiffer said. And though the company will embrace upcoming rival 64-bit Merced chip from Intel and Hewlett-Packard, Compaq will also continue to incorporate the Alpha processor in systems.