Following approval by HP shareholders earlier this week for the Compaq Computer acquisition, the question remains as to how this will impact the Australian marketplace.

A spokesperson for HP wouldn't reveal details about plans for the Australian operations, only saying that any announcements were at least another couple of weeks away.

Reports from the US have indicated that the final tally from IVS Associates was 838,401,376 HP shares voted in favour of the deal, compared with 793,094,105 shares voted against the proposal -- a difference of a little less than 3 percent. Nearly 14 million shares abstained.

But Matthew Boon, principal analyst for hardware platforms at analyst Gartner, believes that now that the Hewelett challenge has been thrown out for both companies it's a matter of getting on with the job at hand. "There had been quite a lot of confusion in the market about what's happening, so I think now that's [the Hewlett challenge] behind them it's a positive step for both organisations."

Boon said that in the initial throes of the announcement people were asking how was it going to affect end users. "[But] at the end of the day you have two very large and very strong organisations and they're not about to do anything which is going to impact their customer base," Boon said.

Boon said that from here on the key would be for the two companies to execute very quickly. According to Boon, the companies had been heavily developing their plans, from a roadmap and staffing perspective. "If there's anything to be learnt from the Compaq-Digital merger it's clear and quick execution," he said.

Boon believes that end users will want to be clear, "from the word go", about what they can expect from the merged entity. "When you get into the very high revenue and margin enterprise-style installations with three, four and five year rollouts, they've got to be sure what they're investing in."

In the US yesterday, at Merrill Lynch's Hardware Heaven conference, incoming company president Michael Capellas told investors that the company would hit the ground running.

Capellas has also indicated that many Compaq products would survive the merger. -When we had the choice between two products, market share wins unless you give me some awfully compelling reason," he said.

Additional reporting by Michael Kanellos and Ian Fried

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