Big Q hits back at Gartner Alpha report

Compaq has repudiated suggestions from marketing research firm the Gartner Group that the Alpha programme is in any sort of danger. A report on the Gartner Group's home page gives probability figures for the Alpha platform continuing and discusses its involvement in the Monterey project, as well as commenting on the demise of its Alpha NT endeavour. But Richard George, Alpha director of marketing at Compaq UK, claimed the report, while in some ways positive, did not describe the whole picture. George said: "Where's the five year roadmap from any other vendor? We'll put the Alpha processor into the Himalaya boxes and the product is good for the Unix platform. We've over 6,500 applications running on Tru64 Unix, that's more than any other vendor." He said that Gartner's suggestion that Compaq might drop the EV bus for an IA-64 solution was "not credible". He said that Compaq's Alpha offerings were not small fry. "We'll never do that," he said. Compaq is spending $100 million on marketing over the next three or four weeks, said George. Gartner doubts about Monterey were also without foundation. The company will support Monterey on clients and on Alpha, and will move it to 64-bit Unix, he said. He claimed that Compaq was having success in migrating many of its former Alpha NT customers to x.86 Proliants already as part of its support programme. ® The Gartner report is here.