Compaq throws weight behind e-business

NEWS Compaq is betting its future on the Internet according to its CEO and president, Eckhard Pfeiffer. Speaking at the company's Innovate Forum '99 in Houston, Texas he unveiled a range of products, services and applications - dubbed NonStop e-business - to enable companies to jump on the ecommerce bandwagon. Pfeiffer predicted Compaq would eventually be the leading Internet company. "It's abundantly clear that the Internet will become the dominant means of doing business worldwide... and our goal now is Internet leadership," he said. Pfeiffer admitted it was an "ambitious goal" and defended his right to use the term "e-business", a phase more commonly associated with rival IBM's ecommerce strategy. "Nobody owns the term e-business, it's a generic term," he explained. The Nonstop e-business products will be divided into four divisions: ecommerce, messaging and collaboration, enterprise applications and business intelligence. Directory services will also play a key role in delivering the e-business products, Pfeiffer explained. However, the initiative relies heavily on the support of the company's partners such as Microsoft and Novell. Taking a swipe at IBM's lack of partnership support, Chris Conway, vice president of the enterprise computing company, said: "Making the claim to be able to do this is one thing - but delivering on it is another. IBM's e-business is fragmented, you can't point to large numbers of people who are implementing it. You can't provide this sort of service unless you have access to the leading companies." The move is part of a long-term strategy by Compaq to distance itself from being just a PC company. Conway said: "Three or four years ago we were just a PC company and we were the leaders, but we didn't know where to go from there, so we set up Project Cross Roads. We concluded that Compaq wanted to be a fully fledged IT provider to the enterprise. "This is the final nail in the coffin in saying that we are no longer a PC company but a leading provider of Internet computing," he added.