Industry watch Toolkit

Compaq, Dell head big NT roll-out

Martin Veitch ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 02 Aug 1996 16:31 BST

"Over the last few months we have seen demand for NT Workstation increase dramatically in our commercial accounts," said Steve Jackson, senior product marketing manager at Compaq.

Jackson said the Deskpro's Intelligent Manageability desktop management architecture fits in well with NT's native support for SNMP, making it easier to manage clients remotely. NT Workstation 4.0 also natively supports Compaq's LS-120 120Mb floppy drive.

All Compaq Deskpro 6000 systems and Pentium Pro-based Deskpro 2000 and Deskpro 4000 units will ship with NT Workstation 4.0 from the fourth quarter. Deskpro buyers who get NT Workstation 3.51 will be offered a free upgrade to NT 4.0 until December 31, 1996.

Announcements regarding NT support in Compaq's ProLiant servers and Armada notebooks will be made "later in the year", Compaq said.

Dell, which like Compaq has also been offering a free upgrade voucher for NT 3.51 buyers, will offer NT as a pre-installed option across its lines.

David Moore, Dell Dimension product marketing manager, said he expected a boost to Pentium Pro sales. "We expect a significant increase in Pentium Pro sales. Lots of our corporate customers have been evaluating the beta of NT 4.0 and sales of Pentium Pro are accelerating very fast anyway. The two products are a perfect match for each other."

"The fall in RAM pricing will have significantly helped NT's chances and with 32-bit APIs now so well embedded, the other big barrier is disappearing so a lot of things are coming together for NT. Our plan is to ride the wave."