News release

Compaq NonStop Himalaya Server Ranks #1 in a Lowest Total Cost of Ownership Study (Advisory)

For the second consecutive time, Compaq Computer Corporation's (NYSE: CPQ) NonStop Himalaya server is rated the industry leader in lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) study of high-end enterprise systems.

The Standish Group International, an independent research and advisory firm focusing on the mission-critical marketplace, has released the results of their latest TCO study entitled, Dollars to Cents: TCO in the Trenches 2002.

Compaq NonStop systems overall ranked lower than any high-end enterprise system in its competitive range of price performance, and first among all systems in the study when factoring in "application cost" and "downtime cost."

Jim Johnson, chairman, The Standish Group, said, "Looking at cost from a one dimensional point of view, such as the basic cost of hardware, the NonStop Himalaya server doesn't appear that competitive, but adding infrastructure software like a relational database and manpower to maintain the applications and operation, it starts to be very competitive against more perceived cheaper alternatives." Johnson continued, "If you then add the cost of downtime into mix, the value of NonStop servers becomes clear."

Pauline Nist, vice president and general manager for Compaq's NonStop Division, said, "The need for continuous availability systems has gone mainstream, leading more and more vendors to sell the concept of continuous availability, without delivering the goods. Most continuous availability discussions neglect real-world availability issues by ignoring downtime for planned maintenance and upgrades, or by measuring downtime in relationship to system availability rather than application availability."

Nist continued, "The Standish Group's TCO study results reflect a true and complete view of total system cost, providing further evidence that when considering all associated costs, including the biggest cost of all—the cost of downtime—Compaq NonStop systems achieve the overall lowest total cost of ownership in the industry."

The Standish Group research study compared overall TCO costs of sixteen popular system types to evaluate the operational and cost environment of the various systems. The study results are based exclusively on customer data input from over 1,200 end users representing over 2,000 case studies and more than fifty applications. The study examined critical TCO factors such as basic system cost, mission-critical application costs, hardware and software costs, manpower costs, and the cost of downtime.

For more information on The Standish Group's TCO research study results, go to the Compaq Web site at http://nonstop.compaq.com/view.asp?IO=TCORPT.

Company Background

Founded in 1982, Compaq Computer Corporation is a leading global provider of information technology products, services and solutions for enterprise customers. Information on Compaq and its products and services is available at http://www.compaq.com.