The challenge for Rose now is to shift the customers Compaq inherited from Digital over to new Compaq servers utilizing Microsoft's Windows NT operating system.
But he batted down any suggestion that Intel's Red Hat investment was a warning to Microsoft, which wants to win corporate hearts and wallets with its NT operating system running on Intel-based server machines.
The device will work with multiple flavors of Microsoft 's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people) Windows operating system, including Windows 98, NT 4.0, 2000 and ME.