NEW YORK-Compaq Computer Corp. received 237 orders for its new AlphaServer GS Series by mid morning the first day the company began selling the servers, said Michael Capellas, president and chief executive officer.
Of these sales, “40 percent were from telecommunications carriers because of the explosion in the wireless marketplace,” said Bill Heil, vice president and general manager of Compaq’s unit focused on business critical servers. “We are No. 2 in the world in customer care and billing for wireless telcos, and No. 1 in Europe and Asia,” he added.
Another 30 percent of the first few hours’ worth of orders came from companies engaged in electronic commerce and an equal percentage from organizations, like researchers decoding the human genome, that require high-performance technical computing, he said.
Heil said he expects the early returns to presage future sales of the AlphaServer GS Series in the three high-growth markets Compaq has targeted. Capellas said he expects the new Alpha servers to “add $1 billion in incremental revenues during the second half of this year.”
The chief executive, now in his eighth month on the job, also said the company had devoted substantial research and development during the past five years before developing the AlphaServer GS Series in order to anticipate several trends.
“One new trend, actually a mega-trend that has only surfaced within the last six months, is that control of the Web is moving to the edge of the networks because choices are being made off of handheld devices,” he said.
“The explosion in wireless mobility is creating pressure to move transactions to the edge. At the back-end, this creates the need for a nonstop transaction engine that is absolutely fault tolerant sitting at the core of continuous computing.”
The new Alpha servers are designed to meet that demand for processing capabilities in a secure environment in real time, Capellas said.
“As you add breakthrough performance, however, you create unbelievable demands for data storage that is radically scalable,” he said.
For this reason, Compaq has turned to Oracle Corp., Redwood Shores, Calif., for provision of the Oracle E-Business Suite running the Oracle8i database.
Although a single new Compaq/Oracle system can scale to 32 processors and ultimately grow by a factor of 20 over time, it also is designed to start small, Heil said.
“Customers can start at the low entry price of less than $100,000 and scale up in bite-size chunks to $1.5 million for a complex configuration,” he said.
“Existing customers don’t have to change their operating systems or applications environment. Customers can also run multiple versions of multiple operating systems at the same time on the same system.”
The new offering also offers a capability described in a phrase the Gartner Group coined, “zero latency engine.” This allows companies to make business decisions in real time based on all the available data, Heil said.
Compaq expects to begin shipping the new servers in June and to reach full volume shipments during the third quarter.
