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Compaq's Enrico The Cloak takes wing

Pesatori leaves gaping hole in lineup

Enrico Pesatori, a senior VP at Compaq in charge of its server strategy, is to leave the firm to head up server firm Synaxia, it emerged yesterday. Pesatori, nicknamed "The Cloak" when he was at Digital, because he often wore a cloak when he was out and about, was in charge of Compaq's Alpha Wildfire project, which the firm is to formally introduce on May 16th next. He also had responsibility for Compaq's high end so called "industry standard" Intel-based boxes. The departure of Pesatori leaves a large gap in the senior management structure of Compaq, which is still struggling to re-engineer itself following the departure of CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer last year. Pesatori had worked for both Tandem and Digital, acquisitions engineered by Pfeiffer during his reign at the firm. That made him a survivor after the Compaq "night of the long knives" which deposed Pfeiffer and eventually replaced him with Mike Capellas as CEO. Terry Shannon, editor of newsletter Shannon knows Compaq, told The Register: "The latest iteration of the New World Order is interesting indeed. There is now no senior VP and group general manager of ESSG." Further, said Shannon: "As a result of the realignment, Compaq has stripped the top layer of the ESSG org chart. Three ESSG divisions now report directly to Capellas. These units, Industry Standard Servers, Business Critical ervers, and Storage Products, are managed by Mary McDowell, Bill Heil, and Howard Elias respectively." That takes Pesatori out of the management layer completely. In an exclusive interview earlier this year, Pesatori went some way towards de-emphasising Compaq's Alpha strategy, and promoting its Intel-based server line, running Windows 2000. However, he said then that Compaq expected $1 billion worth of revenues from Wildfire during the course of this year. Pesatori was also responsible for stopping the development of Windows NT and 2000 for the Alpha microprocessor last year, a move which he explained by saying that Compaq "did not want to confuse its customers".

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