Quelle: CIO Asia

On May 3, 2002, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Compaq officially merged, beginning operations as one unified company. The new HPHP serves more than one billion customers across 162 countries. Among the many activities to create a single company was the integration of the hp.com and compaq.com websites, which before the merger operated separately and had distinct brand identities. This was no way to run the business, says Marius Haas, vice president of worldwide e-business at HP. "Customers did not want to navigate two websites, manage two accounts, and deal with two account teams. They wanted one engagement point and one team to deliver the partnership experience they were looking for. On our part, the integration of the two websites was motivated by the need to have a portfolio of products larger than any competitor's. When our customers log on to hp.com, they should have access to our full portfolio of products and services," he explains.The integration of the two websites necessitated Haas and his team to consolidate the commerce engine so that the blue supply chain of HP and the red supply chain of Compaq products were made invisible to both companies' customers. Alles zu HP auf CIO.de

Indeed, having a single hp.com experience was one of the day-one deliverables for Haas in the two companies' integration blueprint. In May last year, Haas and his team delivered. A single global entry point to hp.com went "live" then, providing a single product andservices catalogue with 10,000 products and services within a virtual showroom.

"Launching a single brand - that was the easy part," says Haas. "The difficult part was dealing with two large infrastructures, at times more than two because when Compaq acquired Digital and Tandem, the same rigour in merger planning was not applied, and in some instances, there remained Digital and Tandem equipment and systems that talked to one another but were not fully integrated."

Although HP and Compaq did not come into the merger consolidation cold, they needed to call in experts to avoid falling into common M&A death-traps. Haas himself was responsible for the integration planning and execution of all business systems and their attendant processes and operations, including customer-facing Internet activities from hp.com, public stores, extranets and B2B e-procurement integration solutions. Haas has experience consolidating Compaq's Webinfrastructure and operations after Compaq decided that a centralised model would leverage efficiency and improve cost structure. This experience, he says, helped him tremendously to think about what systems and processes to rationalise, and what criteria to base these decisions on. The first action by Haas' team's was to create a gateway structure that dictated what would be consistent around the world on May 7, 2003. From there, they then brought in more operating teams and consolidated the pieces underneath. Haas first put forth a plan for the site's infrastructure that acted as a foundation for how the rest of the sites would come together. His team also had to bring together the internal sites specific to a segment into one infrastructure. Haas says he came up with a number of different scenarios and asked ex-Compaq head honcho Michael Capellas and HP chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina which fitted their objectives. Planning started in November 2002 and the site went "live" on the first day of the merger.

Haas says the process of choosing the technology to be retained was a straightforward one. "We followed an 'adopt-and-go' guiding principle," he says. "We were not going to create new systems and could not afford to define new requirements as we wanted to immediately have people who knew the systems and business processes intimately and who could train the other half of the organisation. It also made sense from the cost savings perspective." Decisions were made on the basis of how quickly cost savings could be delivered based on knowledge and expertise they already had.