Compaq Computer Corp has disintegrated its Tandem Computers Inc division and consolidated it into its Enterprise Computing Group, as we anticipated it would (CI No 3,431). Former Tandem Division president Enrico Pesatori was announced as vice president of marketing in the new company structure, following the closure of Compaq’s acquisition of Digital Equipment Corp, and now it has emerged that all former Tandem and DEC products will be branded under the Compaq name. Compaq has been revealing further details about how the ‘new’ company will function. It has set itself a target of becoming a $50bn organization by 2000, and is grappling with Hewlett-Packard Co at the moment, for the title of the world’s second largest computing company, after IBM Corp. Compaq vice president and managing director in the UK, Joe McNally said his arm of the organization wants to become the NT juggernaut, accelerating the use of NT in the enterprise environment and developing Alpha as the standard platform for 64-bit NT. Compaq wants to take Tandem’s high end products and apply them to NT, to attract wider audience and adoption. It is still waxing lyrical about becoming an overall solutions company, and has revealed it is soon to announce a hand held computer device, to complete its high to low end product catalogue. The service business that Compaq has acquired from DEC has forced Compaq to set itself targets in that space as well. The company believes that by 2002 half of what organizations spend on IT will be for services, and by 2000 Compaq hopes to have established a $145bn business. While the main US management structure has been announced for the new Compaq (CI No 3,431), structures in foreign subsidiaries have yet to be decided. The UK is the most profitable Compaq – and DEC – subsidiary, and McNally says its management structure will be announced before the end of this month. It should also be known by then how many of the 17,000 planned lay-offs will affect the UK. McNally was hesitant to comment on specifics, but has said there is quite a lot of duplication, and highlighted the two Tandem and Compaq manufacturing plants in Scotland. According to McNally, the Compaq-DEC acquisition is the most significant such purchase since Burroughs and Sperry merged in 1986 and became Unisys Corp.
