More technologies and services to support e-business

More technologies and services to support e-business

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Remember Eckhard Pfeiffer? He used to be the
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Compaq Computers, the company
that sells the most PCs in the world. Six months ago, he was told
to quit. He has just started work at Intershop Communications, an
e-commerce company jointly based in San Francisco and Hamburg. In
an interview in Forbes recently he says he has not yet fully
recovered from the shock. "I had just come up with a recovery
plan. Then bam!"

Regardless of what he said in his defense, the company he led
successfully for several years is not in a very good shape.
According to both IDC and Dataquest, the latest news is that Dell
has taken over Compaq's place as the top PC vendor in the U.S.,
although worldwide Compaq is still holding on to its top
position. Compaq has found a replacement CEO from its internal
circle, Michael Capellas. Even today Compaq is still in the
process of reinventing itself.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket, the saying goes. And it
seems that Compaq agrees with it. As the PC business is getting
tougher, the company is now entering the e-commerce service
industry in a serious fashion. In the Ballroom of Singapore's
Conrad International Centennial recently, Compaq's senior Vice
President and General Manager of enterprises solutions and
services group Enrico Pesatori launched their 24-hour NonStop E
-Business Solutions for the Asia Pacific region. After the
launch, witnessed by a group of journalists from the region,
Pesatori signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Tata
Technologies.

The alliance with Tata Technologies, which is one of the
oldest, largest and best-known Indian conglomerates, will merge
the two companies' skills in providing enterprise solutions to
manufacturing industries. These solutions will include hardware,
networks and infrastructure-related products and services in e-
business, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer
relationship management (CRM) and engineering automation systems.

Not only PCs

For its survival, Compaq does not rely solely on its PCs and
notebooks, such as the Presarios, the Armadas, the Prosignias and
the Deskpros. It also sells the popular Intel-based Proliant
servers; Servers in general have a far better profit margin than
the more competitive PCs. In addition, Compaq also acquired two
strong companies during the Pfeiffer era, Tandem Computer and
Digital. Both of them have added high-end technologies to the
company's portfolio of computing products.

Tandem is the acknowledged leader in the extremely high fault-
tolerant computing industry. It makes computers that have
everything in tandem: Two processors, two memory modules, two
sets of hard disks. Thanks to the configuration, the machine can
virtually run with no downtime at all. Even when one of the
processors is being replaced, it will continue working. These
machines, needless to say, are not for everybody; only large
enterprises can afford them.

Digital have brought in a line of Alpha midrange servers,
which have also enjoyed a strong market share (first introduced
in 1992, the 64-bit Alpha microprocessor was the brainchild of
the acquired Digital Corp.). The servers, which operate on
Windows NT, Tru64 UNIX, OpenVMS and Linux, are used to run
applications such as Internet servers, Web servers, enterprise
applications, data warehousing/mining and media asset management.
Offering such a wide range, Compaq boasts that "each time you
make a credit card purchase, trade stock, withdraw money from an
automated teller machine, dial emergency 911, request directory
assistance or place a cellular call, chances are that you have
touched a Compaq server". Now, with the launch of its business
solution package for businesses that must be up and running 24
hours a day, 365 days a year, Compaq has placed an additional egg
in another basket.

NonStop with R

Compaq has turned the common word "NonStop" into a registered
trade mark of its high-end servers, the Alpha-based NonStop
Himalaya S-series family of servers. You'll notice the (TM) or
(R) symbol after this word in the company's literature. Current
members of the family are S700, S7000 and S70000 S-series
servers; and the latest addition, the S72000 S-series. Besides
the AlphaServers, these Himalaya servers, which are optimized for
running mission-critical e-business applications involving
complex transactions and rich data types with continuous
availability, data integrity, distributed transaction processing
and databasing, open networking and security, are the core of
Compaq NonStop E-Business Solutions launched in Singapore.

Other building blocks include solution packs that are built
for Internet Protocol (IP), StorageWorks and Enterprise Network
Storage Architecture (ENSA) and plug and play applications for
specific functions.

To service the customers who plan to hop on board the speeding
e-commerce train, Compaq's 27,000 service professionals and
30,000 partner service professionals around the world will help
plan, design, implement, integrate and manage their NonStop
Business Solutions.

Interestingly, one of its customers is the Vatican. Now,
perhaps it is high time somebody let Gus Dur know that the
Vatican has Internet, extranet, intranet and Web site services.
So should his government.