Home Depot Upgrades PCsHome Depot Upgrades PCs

Home Depot Inc. continues to renovate its IT operations. The home-improvement chain last week signed a deal with Hewlett-Packard for 40,000 Compaq Evo D510 PCs that will be used at the company's 1,456 retail stores nationwide. Home Depot plans to use the new computers primarily to improve operations, customer service, and employee-education programs.

By standardizing on a single type of PC, Home Depot executives want more consistent performance from the desktop machines that connect salespeople to the company's applications and data. Home Depot earlier this month revealed plans to build a massive data warehouse to improve operations (see "An IT Fixer-Upper," Sept. 30, p. 20). The number of PCs that Home Depot is buying represents only a fraction of the total HP shipped worldwide last quarter--about 4.7 million. But given the economy, it's a "glimmer of hope" in HP's competition with Dell for PC sales leadership, says IDC research analyst Alan Promisel. "There really aren't a lot of big PC contracts out there."