NEWS BRIEFS
New York, N.Y. — Nicole Volpe reports that Compaq Computer Corp. unveiled new data storage products intended to vault the company first place in the market for managing the vast amounts of data generated by electronic commerce.
Houston-based Compaq said servers – the computers that form the backbone of the Internet – and storage products based on Intel chips will be the high-growth areas for the company. Compaq’s second-quarter storage revenue was flat. Last year’s storage sales totaled $5.1 billion. Shares of Compaq rose 1/2 to 28-5/8. Its 52-week high was 33-3/16, its low 18-1/4.
“In the storage arena, we are targeting 15 percent revenue growth,” Mary McDowell, Compaq’s vice president and general manager of the industry standard server group, said in an interview. The new products include the TaskSmart N-series appliance, Compaq’s first server appliance geared toward the market for network-attached storage (NAS). NAS so allows for remote access to data files. The TaskSmart N-series appliance starts at $34,710 and will be available within 30 days.
Compaq also debuted new storage area network devices that attach to computers to store data at the heart of a network. The lower cost RA4100 SAN, a group of storage devices, is priced starting at $19,800 and is available immediately.
McDowell said the goal is for Compaq to be the No. 1 provider of network attached storage within 12 months, on a units-shipped basis, displacing current market leader Network Appliance Corp.
Our goal is not to merely displace them (Network Appliance),” she said. “The goal is to drive the growth in this market.”
Overall storage leader EMC Corp., as well as Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., are making moves into the market for network-attached storage as well.
The market for NAS is expected to move from $1 billion to $6.5 billion by 2003, according to Gartner Group.
McDowell said storage could be sold as part of a package along with traditional servers, which carry out the basic operations of a Web site.
Compaq’s server business exceeded goals for 20 percent revenue growth with about 40 percent revenue growth in the second quarter.
============================================================