The high-end storage division of Compaq Computer Corp. signed $900 million worth of new business spanning 63 petabytes of data over the past six months, according to officials.
The Houston companys Enterprise Storage Group made the announcement Monday in the wake of large customer wins from rivals like Dell Computer Corp recently and in the midst of Compaqs pending acquisition by Hewlett-Packard Co.
The new customers are Allina Hospitals & Clinics, a nonprofit group in Minneapolis, Minn.; ARVEST Bank Operations Inc., of Lowell, Ark.; BrickMill Marketing Services, of Nashua, N.H.; the city of Vienna, Austria; the DirecTV division of Hughes Electronic Corp., of El Segundo, Calif.; Dollar Rent A Car Systems Inc., in Tulsa, Okla.; Greenwich Hospital, of Greenwich, Conn.; Highbridge Capital Inc., in New York City; Intellinet ASA, an ASP in Oslo, Norway; D. Swarovski & Co., a Wattens, Austria crystal manufacturer; Tyson Foods Inc., of Springdale, Ark.; the University of Hong Kong; and Valley Baptist Health System, in Harlingen, Texas.
In a statement, Compaq directly attacked storage rival EMC Corp., saying the Hopkinton, Mass., companys Symmetrix technology is outdated and that the market is moving away from legacy mainframe storage hardware.
For 2001, Compaq had an overall market share lead of 18.2 percent, compared with EMCs 15.6 percent market share in 2001, according to International Data Corp. However, EMC had a 21.2 percent share vs. Compaqs 15.4 percent share in the key category of external systems, IDC reported late last year.
Still, the two companies have shown some amount of cooperation, sharing APIs recently, although Compaq officials later accused EMC officials of lying about the scope of the relationship.
However, the real battle in the future is over software, not the increasingly commoditized hardware, industry analysts say.