New HP details roadmap ahead

Standing in front of a panel with pictures of hundreds of HP and Compaq

employees and the slogan; "We are ready,'' HP's Carly Fiorina and Compaq's

Michael Capellas officially opened their newly combined company pen for

business. Wall Street immediately indicated it liked what it saw and HP shares

rose above $20 for the first time in five months.






"Clearly, we are focused on building one strong new company, one strong new
team, one strong new culture, and teamwork is going to be a very important

aspect of our success, "Fiorina said. "The best teams are forged

during difficult times, not easy times." Fiornia and Capellas, who barely

survived a gruesome six-month merger battle, said the new company will be split

into four business units, three of which will be headed by HP executives.






As expected a number of competing product lines will be abandoned, such as
Compaq's printer business and HP's Jornada PDA. Both HP and Compaq brands will

be sold in the consumer personal-computer market. But in desktops and notebooks

for business users, Compaq will replace HP, which has struggled to make inroads

in commercial PC sales.



Many analysts have said they expect Capellas, as the head of daily operations,
to bear much of the responsibility of reassuring and motivating uneasy

employees. "I'm going to be out there a lot. Do I view there is a role that

I can play in really bringing people together, building consensus, building

teams? Absolutely. I am a mix-it up guy. Everyone will tell you that.''






Some 15,000 workers will be laid off over the next nine months as a result of
the redundancies created by the merger. In addition thousands more will be fired

for other reasons.






The four product groups within the new HP organization are: Enterprise Systems
Group will be headed by Peter Blackmore from Compaq; HP Services falls under

HP's Ann Livermore; Imaging and Printing will be led by Vyomesh Joshi from HP;

and Personal Systems will be headed by Duane Zitzner from HP






Fiorina also released the first details of the new "product road map,"
which specifies which products from the two companies will survive and which

will be phased out or killed outright.






PCs and Workstations: The new company will retain both HP and Compaq
brands in desktop and notebook PCs. Consumers will be offered HP Pavilions, and

small and medium businesses will get Presarios. The HP brand will dominate in

workstations, with X86, PA-RISC and 64-bit Itanium lines being sold under

pre-existing HP brands. Compaq thin clients will survive, and HP's will be

killed off.






Servers: Server lines will all keep moving toward Intel's Itanium
processor architecture, and the AlphaServer platform will be phased out as

previously planned by Compaq. HP servers will be sold under the Compaq ProLiant

brand, and HP's NetServer name will be phased out. Those ProLiants will run

HP-UX, whileTru64 will be killed. But HP will integrate the Tru64 clustering and

advanced file system into HP/UX. The new company will embrace Compaq's NonStop

server family, which will be called HP NonStop Servers.






Storage: HP StorageWorks (the storage solution formerly known as
"Compaq StorageWorks") lives on, as will HP OpenView, as the name for

storage software, and ENSA (Enterprise Network Storage Architecture). The

company will continue to offer the StorageWorks EVA architecture but, around the

middle of next year, will phase out HP VA solutions for HP-UX-centric

environments and StorageWorks EMA modular arrays for heterogeneous environments.

Compaq and HP storage networking products will be consolidated into one product

line with common firmware and integration. The StorageWorks appliance will be

the entry level NAS. The company will also consolidate storage virtualization

strategies from both companies. The SANlink and VersaStor technologies will be

merged.






Enterprise Software: The OpenView brand will devour all management
software from both companies. Utility Data Center software survives, but will

"leverage" Compaq's Insight Manager and Adaptive Infrastructure

offerings.