Compaq showcases solutions at ENSA@WORK

Compaq has showcased its strengths in enterprise storage at the ENSA@WORK conference*, the company`s biggest enterprise computing event of the year, April 7 - 11, in Lisbon, Portugal. More than 2,000 Compaq customers, technology and channel partners are set to attend to discuss empowering technology in the context of business continuity, business efficiency and business flexibility.

Olaf Swantee, director, Enterprise Storage, Compaq Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) commented: "The large turnout at ENSA@WORK demonstrates Compaq `s continued leadership in the storage market. Customers, technology partners and channel partners are investing time and money to deploy Compaq` s enterprise storage solutions over the next year and beyond."

Compaq is the enterprise storage market leader. Preliminary figures from the analyst firm IDC suggest that Compaq shipped 47 percent of all disk storage units in Western Europe in 2001 and supplied 29 percent of the total storage system capacity purchased by Western European businesses in 2001. IDC also estimates that Compaq had revenue of $1.59 billion USD in Western Europe in 2001; and was the number one vendor in terms of European disk storage systems revenue.

Swantee added: "Compaq leads the world in terms of both volume and technology solutions in the SAN market. That leadership is clearly evident in Europe, the

Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Customers look increasingly to Compaq enterprise storage solutions because they provide the fastest return on investment; low purchasing costs; and best total cost of ownership." Gartner Dataquest expects that nearly 50 percent of all disk storage shipped next year will be networked, with most implemented as Storage Area Networks (SANs). This growth is being fuelled by demand for secure and always available data whenever and wherever it is needed. Increasingly, data management is the critical success factor for modern businesses as they look to ensure business continuity under any circumstances.

Meanwhile, companies are moving away from proprietary storage systems, said Swantee. "Over the past two years, there`s been a shift in the concept of "enterprise" class storage. Today, we`re in a world of open and flexible architecture and storage area networks (SANs). Companies want their IT infrastructure to become a seamless part of their operations - a utility, in the same way as electricity, water or gas."

Compaq showed it understood the potential future for the storage industry back in 1998 when it announced the ENSA vision. This strategy was Compaq`s blueprint for making storage a utility. ENSA is the storage architecture that provides IT people with "storage at their fingertips" - access to information anywhere, anytime BUTbut with centralised control. Over the last four years, Compaq has delivered on this vision with 11 major product and solutions introductions that have helped establish Compaq as the market leader.