News release

Intel Itanium 2-based HP Integrity Servers Help CompUSA Ramp Inventory Tracking in Time for Holiday Season

CompUSA, one of the nation's leading computer retailers, has selected HP Integrity servers powered by Intel® Itanium® 2 processors, speeding access to time-sensitive inventory data by as much as 85 percent thereby significantly increasing CompUSA's ability to adapt to changing business needs, particularly during the busy holiday season.

This change, an upgrade from a 32-bit environment, enables the company to be more agile in responding to spikes in demand for its computer products, an important competitive differentiator as the holiday buying season approaches. The processing power of the HP Integrity servers powered by Itanium 2 processors also allows CompUSA to run more programs on less hardware, support double or triple the number of users, and will scale to manage ten times the company's current revenue, which dramatically cuts costs associated with maintaining its data center.

"CompUSA's vision is to be able to scale our data warehouse to support our ongoing growth," said Cathy Witt, chief information officer, CompUSA. "The Itanium 2 microarchitecture allows us to get there - to scale up to 8-way, 16-way and in the future to 32-and 64-way servers. As a result of the Itanium 2 processor-based HP Integrity server solution, we have seen tremendous performance improvement on several processes associated with our data warehouse."

Intel/HP

The company has deployed Itanium 2 processor-based HP Integrity rx5670 and HP Integrity rx2600 solution running SAP* enterprise resource planning software and Microsoft*

SQL Server on Microsoft Windows* Server 2003 operating system. The solution enables employees at CompUSA's 227 stores to analyze purchasing trend data. When a store needs to restock a popular product, inventory reports enable the store manager to identify surpluses in other locations. CompUSA chose to test their solution in the HP Solution Center, a secure datacenter resource for customers to perform proof of concept and benchmark work with access to highly skilled HP engineers.

About CompUSA

CompUSA, Inc. is one of the nation's leading retailers and resellers of technology products and services. CompUSA currently operates 227 CompUSA Superstores in over 90 major metropolitan markets across the United States and Puerto Rico that serve retail, small-to-medium businesses, corporate, government and education customers and includes technical service departments. Many of the stores include classroom-training facilities. CompUSA also operates a web site that offers an assortment of over 80,000 items at http://www.compusa.com.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing for consumers, enterprises and small and medium businesses. For the last four quarters, HP revenue totaled $71.3 billion. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.

About Intel

Intel, the world's largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at http://www.intel.com/pressroom.

Intel and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.