Compaq chief speaks out on Unix and NT

Joe McNally, vice president and UK managing director of Compaq, exclusively told Silicon of his company's plans for Digital Unix.

He said the company will be investing in the Digital architecture for the next two to three years but after that it is possible everything could be ported to Windows NT.

He added: "Unix is now the standard that everyone knows, but in the future 60 to 70 per cent of customers will be based on the NT platform."

Jamie Snowdon, analyst at Input thought that two to three years is an ambitious time limit. "Maybe five years," he said. He also pointed out that the best idea to come from the Compaq/Digital merger is the integration of Unix and NT. "NT isn't as robust and scalable as Unix and may never catch up, but to forget Unix isn't a good idea and to ignore NT would be suicidal," he said.

Laurent Lachel, consultant at Ovum, believes that 60 to 70 per cent would be right "if you look at licenses, but not at revenue," adding, "NT will generate more revenue but will not grow to those figures".

For the full TV interview, tune into Silicon's Servers and Supercomputers channel.