By Timothy Prickett Morgan
John Rose, head of Compaq’s Enterprise Computing group, quit his job last week. Rose’s resignation leaves Compaq without one of its more powerful, influential and savvy executives, and his quick departure is obviously fueling speculation that he left because he was not being considered for the CEO job vacated by Eckhard Pfeiffer in April. Rose has also apparently been criticized for dumping a large number of Compaq shares prior to its announcement of poor first quarter results.
Rose came to prominence at Compaq after a big reorganization at Compaq in July 1996, and was one of the few Compaq executives – if not the only one – that was intimately acquainted with both the Digital and Compaq cultures. Prior to joining Compaq in 1993 as the head of its PC division, Rose was one of the bigwigs at Digital’s PC division. Two years ago, Compaq consolidated five divisions – systems, internetworking, portables, desktops and consumer products – into three areas – enterprise computing, PC products and consumer products, and Rose took the helm of Compaq’s newly constituted Enterprise Computing group, and was given the tasks of building enterprise-class server and workstation businesses to compete against mainstream RISC-Unix server vendors.
A year later, after Compaq had at least started to digest Digital Equipment, Rose held onto his position as senior vice president and group general manager of the Enterprise Computing group. This was widely expected since Rose was doing a good job expanding Compaq’s presence the enterprise area and was the best-suited Compaq executive to try to integrate Digital’s server and workstation businesses into Compaq’s. After last summer’s June DEC-merger reorganization, Rose got the added responsibilities of managing the Tandem server line (which up to that point was still a separate division) as well as the DEC Alpha Unix and VMS server and workstation lines and their associated storage products. Rose was also responsible for Compaq’s Unix software development and its strategic marketing partnerships, such as Compaq’s complex partnership with Microsoft for Windows NT platforms. All told, the Enterprise Computing group accounted for about a third of Compaq’s revenues and probably the lion’s share of its profits
Compaq is keeping its lips very tight about exactly what is going on behind its closed boardroom doors these days. All that Ben Rosen, Compaq’s acting CEO and current chairman of the board, did say to the press was that Michael Capellas, Compaq’s current chief information officer, would take over the new role of chief operating officer at Compaq, which he was certain would help the company better focus on meeting customers’ requirements. In a sign that further changes may be coming, Capellas has only been named acting COO, and will until further notice manage the day- to-day operations at Compaq. Capellas joined Compaq in August 1998 after serving as a senior VP and general manager of Oracle’s global energy vertical market; prior to that, Capellas worked for energy engineering firm Schlumberger Limited for 18 years. He also had a stint as director of supply chain management at SAP America.
Compaq also announced that Enrico Pesatori, the current senior VP and acting head of marketing at Compaq, will take over as acting head of the Enterprise Group. Pesatori came to Compaq from Tandem, where he was president, and inherited the acting marketing manager position when Mike Heil, Compaq’s former manager of worldwide sales, left for greener pastures. Fred Jones, VP of information services, steps up to the acting CIO position at Compaq. The CIO job is apparently the fastest way up the corporate ladder at Compaq these days. Capellas replaced CIO John White, who left Compaq last year and was the first of a half dozen top executives who have left since the Digital merger started. In addition to Rose, former CEO Pfeiffer, John Rando (former head of Compaq’s services unit who departed three weeks ago), Heil, Earl Masson (Compaq’s former CFO) and Kenny Kurtzmann, manager of the Compaq.com Web site, rumor has it that Robert Supnik, the creator of the Alpha processor who is currently a vice president of corporate research at Compaq, will vacate his position by the end of the week.
