Headquarters




Compaq World Headquarters (now HP United States) campus consisted of 80 acres (320,000 m2) of land which contained 15 office buildings, 7 manufacturing buildings, a product conference center, an employee cafeteria, mechanical laboratories, warehouses, and chemical handling facilities.

Instead of headquartering the company in a downtown Houston skyscraper, then-CEO Rod Canion chose a West Coast-style campus surrounded by forests, where every employee had similar offices and no-one (not even the CEO) had a reserved parking spot. As it grew, Compaq became so important to Houston that it negotiated the expansion of Highway 249 in the late 1980s, and many other technology companies appeared in what became known as the "249 Corridor".

After Canion's ouster, senior vice-president of human resources, Hans W. Gutsch, oversaw the company's facilities and security. Gutsch had an extensive security system and guard station installed on the eight floor of CCA-1, where the company's senior vice presidents had their offices. Eckhard Pfeiffer, president and CEO, introduced a whole series of executive perks to a company that had always had an egalitarian culture; for instance, he oversaw the construction of an executive parking garage, previously parking places had never been reserved.

On August 31, 1998, the Compaq Commons was opened in the headquarters campus, which featured a conference center, an employee convenience store, a wellness center, and an employee cafeteria.

In 2009, HP sold part of Compaq's former headquarters to the Lone Star College System. Hewlett Packard Buildings #7 & #8, two eight-story reinforced concrete buildings totaling 450,000 square feet, plus a 1,200-car parking garage and a central chiller plant, were all deemed by the college to be too robust and costly to maintain so they were demolished by implosion on September 18, 2011.

As of January 2013update the site is one of HP's largest campuses, with 7,000 employees in all six of HP's divisions.. In 2018 HP announced the sale of the entire former Compaq HQ campus.

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