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    Hewlett-Packard

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    The Hewlett-Packard Company (Template:Nyse), commonly referred to as HP, is an information technology corporation, specializing in personal computers, notebook computers, servers, network management software, printers, digital cameras, and calculators, among other technology related products

    Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States, it has a global presence in the fields of computing, printing, and digital imaging, and also provides software and services. The company, which once catered primarily to engineering and medical markets—a line of business it spun off as Agilent Technologies in 1999—now markets to households and small business products such as printers, cameras and ink cartridges found in grocery and department stores.

    HP posted US $91.7 billion in annual revenue in 2006 compared to US$91.4 billion for IBM, making it the world's largest technology vendor in terms of sales. In 2007 the revenue was $104 billion, making HP the first IT company to report revenues >$100 billion.

    According to Gartner, HP is the largest worldwide seller of personal computers, surpassing rival Dell, market research firms Gartner and IDC reported in October 2006; the gap between HP and Dell widened substantially at the end of 2006, with HP taking a near 3.5% market share lead.

    Contents

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    Company history

    Image:Hpheadquartersentrance.jpg
    Main entrance of HP headquarters building in Palo Alto
    Image:Hpbuilding.jpg
    HP branch office in Israel
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    Founding

    William (Bill) Hewlett and David (Dave) Packard both graduated from Stanford University in 1934. The company originated in a garage in nearby Palo Alto during a fellowship they had with a past professor at Stanford during the Great Depression.

    The partnership was formalized on January 1, 1939 with an investment of US$538. Hewlett and Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett. Packard won the coin toss but named their electronics manufacturing enterprise the "Hewlett-Packard Company".

    HP incorporated on August 8, 1947, and went public on November 6, 1957.

    Of the many projects they worked on, their first financially successful product was a precision audio oscillator, the Model 200A. Their innovation was the use of a small light bulb as a temperature dependent resistor in a critical portion of the circuit. This allowed them to sell the Model 200A for $54.40 when competitors were selling less stable oscillators for over $200. The Model 200 series of generators continued until at least 1972 as the 200AB, still tube-based but improved in design through the years. At 33 years, it was perhaps the longest-selling basic electronic design of all time.

    One of the company's earliest customers was The Walt Disney Company, who bought eight Model 200B oscillators (at $71.50 each) for use in certifying the Fantasound surround sound systems installed in theaters for the movie Fantasia.

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    Early years

    The company was originally rather unfocused, working on a wide range of electronic products for industry and even agriculture. Eventually they elected to focus on high-quality electronic test and measurement equipment.

    Throughout the 1940s to well into the 1990s the company focused on making signal generators, voltmeters, oscilloscopes, counters, and other test equipment. Their distinguishing feature was pushing the limits of measurement range and accuracy. For instance, almost every HP voltmeter or signal generator has one or more extra clicks of its knobs than its competitors. HP meters would measure down and up an extra 10 to 100 times the units of other meters. Although there were good reasons why competing meters stopped at 1 volt full scale, HP engineers developed ways of extending the range of their equipment by a considerable amount. They also focused on extreme accuracy and stability, leading to a wide range of very accurate, precise, and stable frequency counters, voltmeters, thermometers, and time standards.

    Following the tradition of the company's first product, the 200A, instruments in the test equipment line were labelled with three to five digits followed by the letter "A". Improved versions went to suffixes "B" through "E". As the company got larger, it started using product designators starting with an alphabetic letter for accessories, supplies, software, and components in order to avoid running out of numbers for major products.

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    The 1960s

    HP is recognized as the symbolic founder of Silicon Valley, although it did not actively investigate semiconductor devices until a few years after the "Traitorous Eight" had abandoned William Shockley to create Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. Hewlett-Packard's HP Associates division, established around 1960, developed semiconductor devices primarily for internal use. Instruments and calculators were some of the products using these devices.

    HP partnered in the 1960s with Sony and the Yokogawa Electric companies in Japan to develop several high-quality products. The products were not a huge success, as there were high costs in building HP-looking products in Japan. HP and Yokogawa formed a joint venture (Yokogawa-Hewlett-Packard) in 1963 to market HP products in Japan.<ref>http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/timeline/hist_60s.html</ref> HP bought Yokogawa Electric's share of Hewlett-Packard Japan in 1999.<ref>Yokogawa Electric Corporation and Hewlett-Packard Company Announce "Hewlett-Packard Japan to become Wholly Owned HP Subsidiary" HP and Yokogawa Sign Agreement</ref>

    Image:HP Oldlogo.gif
    The old HP logo rotated.
    HP spun off a small company, Dynec, to specialize in digital equipment. The name was picked so that the HP logo "hp" could be turned upside down to be the logo "dy" of the new company. Eventually Dynec changed to Dymec, then was folded back into HP.

    HP experimented with using Digital Equipment Corporation minicomputers with its instruments. But after deciding that it would be easier to buy another small design team than deal with DEC, HP entered the computer market in 1966 with the HP 2100 / HP 1000 series of minicomputers. A simple accumulator-based design, with registers arranged somewhat similarly to the Intel x86 architecture still used today, it would last 20 years and several attempts to replace it. It would give birth to the HP 9800 and HP 250 series of desktop and business computers, which predated the PC by nearly a decade.

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    The 1970s

    The HP 3000 was an advanced stack-based design for a business computing server, later redesigned with RISC technology, that has only recently been retired from the market. The HP 2640 series of smart and intelligent terminals introduced forms-based interfaces to ASCII terminals, and also introduced screen labeled function keys, now commonly used on gas pumps and bank ATMs. Although scoffed at in the formative days of computing, HP would eventually surpass even IBM as the world's largest technology vendor in sales.

    HP is acknowledged by Wired magazine as the producer of the world's first personal computer, in 1968, the Hewlett-Packard 9100A.<ref>http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.12/mustread.html?pg=11</ref> HP called it a desktop calculator because, as Bill Hewlett said, "If we had called it a computer, it would have been rejected by our customers' computer gurus because it didn't look like an IBM. We therefore decided to call it a calculator, and all such nonsense disappeared." An engineering triumph at the time, the logic circuit was produced without any integrated circuits; the assembly of the CPU having been entirely executed in discrete components. With CRT display, magnetic-card storage, and printer, the price was around $5000.

    Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, originally designed the Apple I computer while working at HP, but they rejected his proposal as part of their right of first refusal to his work because the company wanted to stay in scientific, business, and industrial markets.

    The company earned global respect for a variety of products. They introduced the world's first handheld scientific electronic calculator in 1972 (the HP-35), the first handheld programmable in 1974 (the HP-65), the first alphanumeric, programmable, expandable in 1979 (the HP-41C), and the first symbolic and graphing calculator HP-28C. Like their scientific and business calculators, their oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and other measurement instruments have a reputation for sturdiness and usability (the latter products are now part of spin-off Agilent's product line). The company's design philosophy in this period was summarized as "design for the guy at the next bench".

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    The 1980s

    In 1984, HP introduced both inkjet and laser printers for the desktop. Along with its scanner product line, these have later been developed into successful multifunction products, the most significant being single-unit printer/scanner/copier/fax machines. The print mechanisms in HP's tremendously popular LaserJet line of laser printers depend almost entirely on Canon's components (print engines), which in turn use technology developed by Xerox. HP develops the hardware, firmware, and software that convert data into dots for the mechanism to print.

    In 1987, the Palo Alto garage where Hewlett and Packard started their business was designated as a California State historical landmark.

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    The 1990s

    In the 1990s, HP expanded their computer product line, which initially had been targeted at university, research, and business customers, to reach consumers.

    HP also grew through acquisitions, buying Apollo Computer in 1989 and Convex Computer in 1995.

    Later in the decade HP opened hpshopping.com as an independent subsidiary to sell online, direct to consumers; in 2005 the store was renamed "HP Home & Home Office Store."

    In 1999, all of the businesses not related to computers, storage, and imaging were spun off from HP to form Agilent. Agilent's spin-off was the largest initial public offering in the history of Silicon Valley. The spin-off created an $8 billion company with about 30,000 employees, manufacturing scientific instruments, semiconductors, optical networking devices, and electronic test equipment for telecom and wireless R&D and production.

    In July 1999, HP appointed Carly Fiorina as CEO. Fiorina was the first woman ever to serve as CEO of a company included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Fiorina was forced to resign on February 9, 2005.

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    2000 and beyond

    HP bought Compaq in 2002. Compaq itself had bought Tandem Computers in 1997 (which had been started by ex-HP employees), and Digital Equipment Corporation in 1998. Following this strategy HP became a major player in desktops, laptops, and servers for many different markets. After the merger with Compaq, the new ticker symbol became "HPQ", a combination of the two previous symbols, "HWP" and "CPQ", to show the significance of the alliance. In 2006 HP outsourced its Enterprise support to countries with cheap workers: the Spanish support moved to Slovakia, the German support moved to Bulgaria and so on.

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    Technology and products

    Image:HP0100A 1.jpg
    "The new Hewlett-Packard 9100A personal computer" is "ready, willing, and able ... to relieve you of waiting to get on the big computer."
    Image:HPComputerHoustonISD.JPG
    A HP Compaq computer and a Hewlett-Packard Deskjet 5740 printer owned by the Houston Independent School District
    Image:HP Pavilion dv6646us.JPG
    A modern HP Pavilion Laptop
    Image:R 817 -2.JPG
    A modern HP digital camera; the HP Photosmart R817.
    Image:HP PhotoSmart SDIO Kamera.jpg
    A camera that uses the SDIO interface

    HP has a successful line of printers, scanners, digital cameras, calculators, PDAs, servers, workstations, and home-small business computers, many of the latter were acquired during the 2002 merger with Compaq. HP today promotes itself as not just being a hardware and software company, but also one that offers a full range of services to architect, implement and support today's IT infrastructure.

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    Imaging and Printing Group (IPG)

    According to HP's 2005 U.S. SEC 10-K filing,<ref name="05-00">[1]</ref> HP's Imaging and Printing Group is "the leading imaging and printing systems provider in the world for printer hardware, printing supplies and scanning devices, providing solutions across customer segments from individual consumers to small and medium businesses to large enterprises." This division is currently headed by Vyomesh Joshi.

    Products and technology associated with the Imaging and Printing Group include:

    [edit]

    Personal Systems Group (PSG)

    HP's Personal Systems Group is "one of the leading vendors of personal computers ("PCs") in the world based on unit volume shipped and annual revenue."<ref name="05-00"/>

    Personal Systems Group products/technology include:

    • Consumer PCs including the HP Pavilion, Compaq Presario and VoodooPC series
    • Workstations for Unix, Windows and Linux systems
    • Handheld Computing including iPAQ Pocket PC handheld computing devices (from Compaq)
    • Digital Entertainment including MediaSmart TV, DVD+RW drives, HP Movie Writer and HP Digital Entertainment Center. HP resold the Apple iPod until November 2005.<ref name="05-00"/>
    • Home Storage Servers
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    HP's Enterprise Storage and Servers Group has product/technology including:

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    HP's Software division has products/technologies:

    With the major acquisitions of Peregrine and Mercury Interactive completed, HP has dropped the names OpenView, Peregrine and Mercury from its portfolio. The Business Technology Optimization (BTO)part of the software division is now being referred to as HP Software. The OpenCall branding still remains.

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    HP Labs

    HP Labs (or HP Laboratories) is the research arm of HP. Founded in 1966, HP Labs' function is to deliver breakthrough technologies and to create business opportunities that go beyond HP's current strategies. An example of recent HP Lab technology includes the Memory spot chip.

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    Partnerships

    HP is a supporter of FOSS and Linux. Some HP employees, such as Linux CTO and former Debian Project Leader Bdale Garbee actively contribute and have Open Source job responsibilities. Many others participate in the Open Source community as volunteers. HP is also known in the (GNU/) Linux community for releasing drivers for many of their printers under the GNU GPL.

    Hewlett-Packard also continues Compaq's extensive relationship with Microsoft and uses technology from most major software and hardware vendors.

    Until November 2005, HP offered a re-branded version of the Apple iPod.<ref name="05-00"/>

    HP partners with many application software companies, for example SAP AG.

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    Sponsorships

    HP has many sponsorships. One well known sponsorship is Walt Disney World's EPCOT Park's Mission: Space. Others can be found on Hewlett-Packard's website [2] From 1995 to 1999 they were the shirt sponsor of English Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur. They also sponsored the BMW Williams Formula 1 team.

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    Product legacy

    Agilent Technologies, not HP, retains the direct product legacy of the original company founded in 1939. Agilent's current portfolio of electronic instruments are descended from HP's very earliest products. HP entered the computer business only after its instrumentation competencies were well-established.

    After the acquisition of Compaq in 2002, HP has maintained the "Compaq Presario" brand on low-end home desktops, the "HP Compaq" brand on business desktops and laptops, and the "HP ProLiant" brand on Intel-architecture servers. (The "HP Pavilion" brand is used on home entertainment laptops and all home desktops.)<ref>http://www.hp.com/</ref>

    HP uses DEC's "StorageWorks" brand on storage systems; Tandem's "NonStop" servers are now branded as "HP Integrity NonStop".

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    Culture

    The founders, known to friends and employees alike as Bill and Dave, developed a unique management style that has come to be known as the HP Way. In Bill's words, the HP Way is "a core ideology . . . [that] includes a deep respect for the individual, a dedication to affordable quality and reliability, a commitment to community responsibility, and a view that the company exists to make technical contributions for the advancement and welfare of humanity."

    The HP Alumni Association maintains a tribute to Bill and Dave's version of the HP Way, circa 1992.

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    Management

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    History

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    Acquisitions

    Below are some of the notable acquisitions<ref>Unofficial list of HP acquisitions and divestitures</ref> of companies and product lines acquired by HP over the decades:

    • Data Systems, Inc: A small 5-person company called Data Systems, Inc. Owned by a chemical manufacturer, Union Carbide, who failed in their diversification efforts, HP bought the group and this helped to launch the HP 2116A in 1966. A computer designed to automate the collection and processing of data from the company’s test and measurement devices, it marked HP's entry into the growing computer industry.
    • Apollo: In 1989, HP acquired Apollo Computer for $476 million. HP was able to achieve a growth in market share after the merger; with the market at the time valued at $4.1 billion and the fastest-growing area of the market.
    • Convex Computer: In 1995, HP acquired Convex Computer, a Richardson, Texas company that produced vector minisupercomputers and supercomputers. The systems had software compatibility with HP's PA-RISC computers and provided an immediate upgrade path. The first 32-CPU V-class systems were shipped in 1998 as a replacement for HP's aging 12-CPU T-class.
    • Verifone: On April 23, 1997, HP announced plans to acquire VeriFone, a provider of card-swipe terminals on retail countertops to approve purchases, in a $1.18 billion stock swap. On May 102001, Gores Technology Group acquired VeriFone from HP.
    • Dazel Corporation: On June 7, 1999, HP acquired Dazel Corporation, located in Austin, Texas, an output management software company. Dazel's Output Server provided compatible capabilities to those offered by HP OpenView.
    • Bluestone Software: On January 182001, HP acquired Bluestone Software, Inc., a provider of Java application server, B2B, B2C, and wireless open platform solutions for $470 million in stock. However, HP was not successful with this acquisition and eventually closed its Bluestone Software division in July 2002.
    • Indigo: On March 22, 2002, HP acquired Indigo N.V,<ref>Template:Cite press release</ref> a provider of digital offset color printing systems. Now the HP Indigo division is manufacturing commercial and specialty digital printers.
    • Novadigm: On April 2 2004, HP acquired Novadigm which provides management products to integrate with the HP Software management software portfolio.
    • CGNZ: On September 7, 2005, HP announced it was going to acquire CGNZ the New Zealand spin-off of Capgemini.<ref>[3]</ref>
    • AppIQ: In October 2005, HP acquired the private company AppIQ (short for "Application IQ"). The company was founded in 2001 by Ash Ashutosh and David Chang, and offered several digital storage solutions. The company had employed up to 235 people by June 2005.
    • Peregrine Systems: On December 192005, HP completed the acquisition of Peregrine, Inc, based in San Diego, California, USA. The acquisition adds leading asset management and enhanced IT service management capabilities to HP OpenView, providing customers with IT asset control and business insight.
    • OuterBay: On February 7, 2006, HP agreed to acquire OuterBay, a provider of archiving software for enterprise applications and databases. OuterBay is headquartered in Cupertino, California, USA, with offices in the US, UK, and India.
    • Silverwire: On June 6, 2006, HP announced it was acquiring Silverwire Holding AG, a commercial digital photography solutions and software provider with a strong presence in the retail photo market. Silverwire is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland.
    • VoodooPC: On September 28, 2006, HP announced it will expand its presence in the gaming market by acquiring VoodooPC, a maker of high-performance gaming, luxury, and entertainment PCs based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. This acquisition closed early in November 2006.
    • Mercury Interactive: On November 7, 2006, HP announced that it had completed the acquisition of Mercury Interactive (MERQ.PK), a company that provided Business Technology Optimization software (software that helps a company govern, develop and maintain its IT).
    • Bitfone: On December 20, 2006, HP announced that it has signed an agreement to purchase Bitfone Corp., a privately held global software and services company that develops software solutions for mobile device management for the wireless industry.
    • Bristol Technology: On February 52007, HP announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Bristol Technology Inc., a provider of technologies that monitor business transactions. Bristol is a private company based in Danbury, Connecticut.
    • Polyserve: On February 27 2007, HP announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire PolyServe, Inc., a provider of storage software for application and file serving utilities. Founded in 1999, PolyServe is headquartered in Beaverton, Ore., has 117 employees and serves more than 500 customers in a variety of industries including finance, energy and technology. HP had an existing relationship with the company OEMing some of their products as the HP StorageWorks Enterprise File Services Clustered Gateway.
    • Tabblo: On March 22 2007, HP announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Tabblo Inc., a privately-held developer of web-based software located in Cambridge, Mass. HP plans to leverage Tabblo’s technologies to make printing from the web easier and more convenient.
    • Arteis: On April 24 2007, HP announced it is acquiring Arteis, a company that operates Logoworks, a distributed web-based graphic design service provider. Arteis is a private company based in Lindon, Utah.
    • SPI Dynamics: On June 192007, HP announced it was acquiring SPI Dynamics, a provider of web application security assessment software and services. The new business would be integrated into the Software Unit of TSG. The deal closed on 1 August2007.
    • Opsware: On July 23 2007, HP announced it was going to acquire Opsware, a developer of data centre management systems, for $1.6 billion.
    • Neoware: On July 23 2007, HP announced it was going to acquire Neoware for $214 million. The company manufactures thin clients and develops software to centralize their management
    • Atos Origin Middle East Group: On October 22 2007, HP announced it was going to acquire Atos Origin Middle East Group, a systems integrator based in the Middle East.
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    References

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    See also

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    External links

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