In the drive to maintain the long-term impetus behind its impressive rate of growth in a far from buoyant personal computer market, Compaq Computer, which added $500m to its international sales last year, is homing in on Eastern Europe as a major opportunity for information technology in the mid 1990s and following decade, president of Compaq Europe and International Eckhard Pfeiffer told a press conference in London yesterday. At the conference, which marked the start of the 1990 Working With Compaq Show, Pfeiffer said that the installed base in Eastern Europe presently comprises only 1.2m units, against 50m in the West, and although Compaq does not expect the same degree of penetration to take place in the foreseeable future, it has already started a process of market appraisal that is likely to culminate in significant product adaptations and new approaches to distribution and support. Meanwhile, the first shipments of Compaq’s 286 line have already crossed to the East following last week’s meeting of the CoCom committee, which went some way to opening the floodgates by ruling in favour of removing that line from the embargo list; Compaq expects the 80386-based products to be next to get the all-clear. However, Pfeiffer acknowledges that there is still a long way to go before the 420m consumers in the East can be wooed with complete freedom. On the question of how to repatriate revenues, Compaq is likely to take one or both of two approaches: by dealing only in hard currency after the fashion of the recently-formed ComputerLand Moscow, or by the formation of new, joint-venture entities. The other major hurdle will clearly be that of distribution, with the channels that do exist being currently in the hands of government agencies; to effect the shift in distribution towards private enterprises will be, admits Pfeiffer, a substantial task. President and chief executive Rod Canion then took the stage to give the Compaq view on various areas of growth in the short term. Canion expects the 80386 processor to gain significant momentum in the desktop market, which will be characterised by an explosion in networking; emphasising Compaq’s support for OS/2, he continued by asserting that the dominance of the Macintosh interface will become less marked as new developments in OS/2 on the 80386 chip, and more advanced Windows applications, make their presence felt. The workstation market is to remain a hotly contested arena with Sun and Apollo machines competing with Unix on the Compaq-favoured Extended Industry Standard Architecture in business applications, while EISA-based 80386 OS/2 will make waves in the technical sphere, he claimed. The next step forward for laptops will inevitably be colour screens, he contended, but it may take a good few years until the price-performance is high enough to make this development a commercial viability. Moving away from personal computers, Canion made it plain that Compaq expects big things from its multiple processor-based SystemPro server released last November, arguing that while SystemPro makes use of two processors – a figure that is likely to increase in the future IBM has still to come to terms the fact that – according to Canion – a second processor would overload the bus in a Micro Channel Architecture machine. Moreover, the success of SystemPro is further guaranteed, Canion went on, because dealers love the profit margins it can bring them – he conceded, however, that questions remained as to whether they are in a position to support it adequately – in this connection, Compaq may look towards the likes of Hoskyns and Logica for support. Nonetheless, Canion said that Compaq still retained faith in its dealers, and intended to add more to the present figure, which now totals more than 1,600 worldwide. The Working With Compaq Show at Kensington Town Hall, London, continues today, finally closing its doors at 5pm.
