HP product line carve up begins

Carly Fiorina, CEO of the newly integrated HP, waved goodbye to a raft of Compaq products last night as she outlined her company's product strategy for the next three years.

The company will be divided into four core business units: enterprise systems, HP services, imaging and printing, and the personal systems group.

In addition, a worldwide operations unit will be created to provide support and strategic direction for the product business groups.

The recent battle with former HP board member Walter Hewlett served only to give the company more time to plan the merger, Fiorina said, making reference to the court case that followed the announcement of the results of the shareholders' merger vote.

Fiorina said three layers of management teams had already been appointed and a fourth layer was expected to be announced within days.

Many product ranges were either terminated or integrated into existing HP brands.

Gone is HP's Jornada handheld in favour of the vastly more successful iPaq. Unsurprisingly, Compaq's proprietary Tru64 Unix was passed over for the Intel based HP-UX.

Michael Capellas, former CEO of Compaq and the newly appointed president of HP, said: "We've taken the additional enhanced technical characteristics of Compaq's Tru64 architecture which over time will be integrated into HP-UX."

These features include clustering and file systems.

Compaq's server division also came under attack. The Proliant servers will be merged into HP's IA-32 offering the ProLiant blade server architecture and HP's Powerbar blade range.

The fault-tolerant Compaq Non-Stop server family will be rebranded as HP Non-Stop and the software management line, TeMIP, will be integrated into HP's OpenView range.

However, HP has decided to adopt Compaq's storage range - XP and Storageworks. The entire storage line will now be called Storageworks with HP's Openview storage trademark being retained for individual products.

HP's corporate PC and notebook product lines have been shelved in favour of the Compaq Presario and Armada. However, in the consumer space, the company will continue to sell both HP's Pavilion and Presario branded products.

HP and Compaq strategic partnerships have also come under review, said Capellas, as the newly integrated company prefers fewer more strategic partners.