HP might have calmed Wall Street's fears about the Compaq acquisition, but one year after the deal was finalized it appears the company has yet to convince the group that matters most: customers.

Whether the topic is service, storage, product road maps or business practices, HP customers generally report experiencing a mix of satisfaction, unhappiness and confusion more than any benefits the company might have touted during its long and contentious battle to gain stockholder approval for the merger. Next week HP executives plan to brief reporters on their "enterprise strategy," and it's a fair bet they also will face questions about the assimilation of Compaq.

Forum: HP/Compaq one year later
What's your opinion of the post-merger company?

"On paper, the merger looks to have gone very well," says John Eisenschmidt, director of packaged application implementation and support for an entertainment production company in Vienna, Va. "As an HP customer, however, I'd have to say it's gone poorly."

Eisenschmidt has HP Alphaservers, Compaq ProLiant servers and a storage-area network (SAN) built with HP products.

"I've seen a dramatic drop in the quality of service, so much so that we stopped buying [what used to be called] Carepaq support contracts and started keeping spare servers on the shelf," Eisenschmidt says. "The failure rate went up, the response time went down, and the expertise I used to know with Alpha and PC technicians on the Compaq side is gone," he says.

His concern is shared by Terry Roedecker, senior network manager for a large financial institution in the Midwest, who says he has experienced similar issues with his ProLiant servers.

"HP has made some cultural changes at Compaq that we don't like," Roedecker says. "One of our biggest servers lost a power supply two weeks after going out of warranty. When we called HP for a courtesy extension, they said they couldn't do courtesy extensions any longer. Compaq had done it several times for us in the past."

Roedecker says his organization also recently lost a motherboard on a server that was in warranty and had next-day replacement guarantees with a technician onsite.

"The parts were here the next day, but the technician wasn't able to show up for three days," Roedecker says. "With Dell, they were onsite in four hours to replace a $30 part." Since switching its business to Dell, Roedecker has acquired 50 servers.