Nuclear project threatened by HP/Q deal

WHEN COMPAQ CEDED ITS Alpha technology to Intel, it made many promises to both corporate and federal clients that everything would just be fine, and it promised, promised to support all the mission critical projects going.

But the strange marriage of convenience between Q and HP may well mean more than a spot of inconvenience for defence, federal and other big clients, we suspect.

First, we have no more of these strong commitments to Tru64 and to other OSes for the Itanic that we heard all about just a few months back, although we wonder why people aren't pumping Carly and Curly about these matters.

Instead, we have the following in a leaked Capellas memo to his long suffering troops: "We have made significant progress in establishing Compaq as an enterprise company. We get more than 50% of our revenue from our server, storage and services business. Our fastest growing businesses have been industry standard servers, enterprise storage and services. And we're winning major enterprise business across the world. But we have two significant gaps in our portfolio that make it difficult for us to be truly recognized as a major player in the enterprise.

"One is a leadership position in data center UNIX. On the plus side, we're competitive in some key segments of the UNIX market. Tru64 UNIX is a technical leader, and we've been gaining market share. But our overall position is not broad enough, particularly in the data center. HP, on the other hand, is No. 2 in the UNIX market and an acknowledged leader in the data center. Together, we will close the gap with the current market leader, Sun, and create new opportunities to grow our UNIX business. "The second key ingredient we are missing is a leading set of open application integration tools to support interoperability. HP's OpenView software suite is an industry leader for Internet-based system and network management and interoperability. That is a vital part of our ability to integrate solutions across the enterprise. By merging with HP we are closing those gaps - and HP closes some gaps of its own, including its competitive positions in industry standard servers and commercial PCs...I know this is not an easy decision for many of you to accept. I have been working through this for the past nine weeks, and I couldn't be more excited about the future of these two great companies..."

We are slightly concerned about this project from a year ago, in which Compaq got the job of building an AlphaServer GS320 375 node, 30 plus Tera-ops superdupercomputer for the Department of Energy, to simulate nuclear testing.

The system, called Q, was hailed at the time because it would remove the need to set off the pesky devices, and turn the drinking water blue.

The same piece we refer to quotes technical director Richard Kaufmann as follows:

"Compaq has long-standing relationships with the NSF, the intelligence community, the DoD, NASA, and others. Our HPTC organization works closely with these U.S. agencies, as well as other organizations outside the U.S."

Could it be any coincidence that large investors in Compaq and HP are voting with their feet today and selling stock in both companies, since they also had "commitments" from Compaq about the future of their technological investments?

The more we gaze at this "marriage of inconvenience", the more we wonder what Capellas was thinking about during the nine weeks quoted above. We know he went to see Mexico's Vicente Fox, and made a trip to Taiwan, but we cannot imagine that either of these visits was concentrating his mind on his customers. µ