Compaq's drive to become the world leader in Internet technologies and services is paving the way for an expansion of its 2,200 strong workforce in Ireland.
According to Mr Andreas Barth, Compaq's senior vice-president and general manager for Europe, the Dublin-based call centre will be at the heart of the company's strategy to become an Internet leader.
Mr Barth told the The Irish Times he was confident the Irish workforce would reap the benefits of Compaq's push to rank AltaVista among the top three global Internet sites within three years.
"Dublin has proven to be a premier site for technology call centres. Following our acquisition of Digital we brought a lot of foreigners into Dublin as other European call centres were closed down. This was only an initial short-term measure to ensure a smooth start up. These people's jobs are now being back-filled out of the Irish market."
Compaq has undergone massive restructuring over the past year. Since the Digital acquisition, Compaq has shed 13,500 workers to bring its global workforce to 27,000. A further 1,000 jobs will be shed by mid-year, but this week Mr Barth said no Compaq workers located in either Dublin or Galway would be affected.
At a press briefing in London, Mr Eckhard Pfeiffer, president and chief executive officer of the second-largest computer company in the world, said Compaq would now be focusing its energies on becoming a global Internet leader. With revenues of $31.2 billion (€35 billion) for 1998, Compaq is currently growing at three times the market rate.
The company is aiming to reach its goal by building on each of the footholds it has gained in the Internet space. With a 15.4 per cent share of the worldwide computer market, Compaq has gained a significant share of some of the computer industry's leading businesses. According to Mr Pfeiffer, 45 per cent of Internet applications are run on Compaq systems.
"The Internet is doing more to transform Compaq than anything else. Our top strategic priority now is to become the number one standards based Internet solutions company," Mr Pfeiffer said.
To achieve the "standards based" element of its objective, Compaq is working with its 100,000 partners and channel distributors worldwide to develop a seamlessly managed Internet infrastructure. "We've been driving standards initiatives, and ultimately we have to work out what is going to be a winning standard and who is going to ship it."
On the consumer end, Compaq is putting a special Internet button on its keyboards which links directly to AltaVista - the jewel in the crown of Compaq's Internet strategy.
Last month, Compaq announced it would float its AltaVista search engine in a bid to cash in on Internet fever. Since then it has added a couple of strings to the AltaVista bow, prompting analysts to speculate the business might be worth $2 billion.
Through a technology agreement with Microsoft, AltaVista will offer Hotmail - the free email service - and an "instant messaging" service. Microsoft has also agreed to replace the Inktomi technology it offers as the primary search service on Microsoft Network with AltaVista technology.
The plan now is to make AltaVista - which, according to Media Metrix, a market research group, was visited by almost 20 per cent of Web users during December - a leading Internet portal or gateway. This poses a big challenge to the two leading portals, Yahoo! and Excite.
Compaq's acquisition of consumer site, Shopping.com, and Zip2, a leading content provider for media companies, is enhancing AltaVista's capabilities beyond that of solely a search engine. It can also rely on the parent company for a dedicated stream of traffic through the new Internet keyboard button on Compaq computers.
