Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), commonly referred to as HP, is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA. HP is one of the world's largest information technology companies and operates in nearly every country. HP specializes in developing and manufacturing computing, data storage, and networking hardware, designing software and delivering services. Major product lines include personal computing devices, enterprise servers, related storage devices, as well as a diverse range of printers and other imaging products. HP markets its products to households, small- to medium-sized businesses and enterprises directly as well as via online distribution, consumer-electronics and office-supply retailers, software partners and major technology vendors.
HP's posted net revenue in 2009 was $115 billion, with approximately $40 billion coming from services. In 2006, the intense competition between HP and IBM tipped in HP's favor, with HP posting revenue of US$91.7 billion,[3] compared to $91.4 billion for IBM; the gap between the companies widened to $21 billion in 2009. In 2007, HP's revenue was $104 billion,[4] making HP the first IT company in history to report revenues exceeding $100 billion.[5] In 2008 HP retained its global leadership position in inkjet, laser, large format and multi-function printers market, and its leadership position in the hardware industry.[6] Also HP became #2 globally in IT services as reported by IDC & Gartner.[7]
Major company changes include a spin-off of part of its business as Agilent Technologies in 1999, its merger with Compaq in 2002, and the acquisition of EDS in 2008, which led to combined revenues of $118.4 billion in 2008 and a Fortune 500 ranking of 9 in 2009.[7] In November 2009, HP announced the acquisition of 3Com.[8] On April 28, 2010, HP announced the buyout of Palm for $1.2 billion. On May 16, 2010, the acquisition of Palm was final.
Company history:-
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard graduated in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1935. The company originated in a garage in nearby Palo Alto during a fellowship they had with a past professor, Frederick Terman at Stanford during the Great Depression. Terman was considered a mentor to them in forming Hewlett-Packard.[9] In 1939, Packard and Hewlett established Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Packard's garage with an initial capital investment of US$538.[10] Hewlett and Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett[11] Packard won the coin toss but named their electronics manufacturing enterprise the "Hewlett-Packard Company". HP incorporated on August 18, 1947, and went public on November 6, 1957.
And while the "Hewlett-Packard Company" had long since moved from their celebrated garage on Addison in Palo Alto, the company did not file for their ubiquitous HP trademark until later on November 12, 1954.[12] Their application indicates the trademark was first used and in commerce on January 1, 1941. The trademark application provided to the United States Patent and Trademark Office included a lengthy list describing HP's goods and services: "instruments used for measuring or testing purposes-namely, attenuator, bolometer mounts, bridges, crystal detectors, directional couplers, electronic counters, electronic frequency meters, frequency and modulation monitors, frequency converters, harmonic wave analyzers, low pass filters, microwave detector mounts, microwave power meters, microwave probes, microwave slotted sections, microwave terminations, microwave thermistor mounts, microwave test sets, noise and distortion analyzers, oscillators."[13]
Of the many projects they worked on, their very first financially successful product was a precision audio oscillator, the Model HP200A. 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, which 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.
[edit] 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.
From the 1940s until well into the 1990s the company concentrated on making electronic test equipment: signal generators, voltmeters, oscilloscopes, frequency counters, thermometers, time standards, wave analyzers, and many other instruments. A distinguishing feature was pushing the limits of measurement range and accuracy; many HP instruments were more sensitive, accurate, and precise than other comparable equipment.[citation needed]
Following the pattern set by the company's first product, the 200A, test instruments were labelled with three to five digits followed by the letter "A". Improved versions went to suffixes "B" through "E". As the product range grew wider HP started using product designators starting with a letter for accessories, supplies, software, and components.
[edit] 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.[14] HP bought Yokogawa Electric's share of Hewlett-Packard Japan in 1999.[15]
HP spun off a small company, Dynac, to specialize in digital equipment. The name was picked so that the HP logo "hp" could be turned upside down to be an reverse reflect image of the logo "dy" of the new company. Eventually Dynac changed to Dymec, then was folded back into HP in 1959.[16] HP experimented with using Digital Equipment Corporation minicomputers with its instruments. But after deciding that it would be easier to build another small design team than deal with DEC, HP entered the computer market in 1966 with the HP 2100 / HP 1000 series of minicomputers. These had a simple accumulator-based design, with registers arranged somewhat similarly to the Intel x86 architecture still used today. The series was produced for 20 years, in spite of several attempts to replace it, and was a forerunner of the HP 9800 and HP 250 series of desktop and business computers.
[edit] 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 terms of sales.[17]
HP is identified by Wired magazine as the producer of the world's first marketed, mass-produced personal computer, the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, introduced in 1968.[18] 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. The machine's keyboard was a cross between that of a scientific calculator and an adding machine. There was no alphabetic keyboard.[citation needed]
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, originally designed the Apple I computer while working at HP and offered it to them under their right of first refusal to his work, but they did not take it up as the company wanted to stay in scientific, business, and industrial markets.[citation needed]
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, the 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".[citation needed]
The 98x5 series of technical desktop computers started in 1975 with the 9815, and the cheaper 80 series, again of technical computers, started in 1979 with the 85.[19] These machines used a version of the BASIC programming language which was available immediately after they were switched on, and used a proprietary magnetic tape for storage. HP computers were similar in capabilities to the much later IBM Personal Computer, although the limitations of available technology forced prices to be high.[citation needed]
[edit] 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.[citation needed]
On March 3, 1986, HP registered the HP.com domain name, making it the ninth Internet .com domain ever to be registered.[20]
In 1987, the Palo Alto garage where Hewlett and Packard started their business was designated as a California State historical landmark.
[edit] The 1990s
In the 1990s, HP expanded their computer product line, which initially had been targeted at university, research, and business users, 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.[21] 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, the first female CEO of a company in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Fiorina served as CEO during the tech downtown of the early 2000s. During her tenure, the market value of HP halved and the company incurred heavy job losses.[22] The HP Board of Directors asked Fiorina to step down in 2005, and she resigned on February 9, 2005.
[edit] 2000 and beyond
On September 3, 2001, HP announced that an agreement had been reached with Compaq to merge the two companies.[23] In May, 2002, after passing a shareholder vote, HP officially merged with Compaq. Prior to this, plans had been in place to consolidate the companies' product teams and product lines.[24]
The merger occurred after a proxy fight with Bill Hewlett's son Walter, who objected to the merger. 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 and also key letters from the two companies Hewlett-Packard and Compaq (the latter company being famous for its "Q" logo on all of its products.)
In the year 2004 HP released the DV 1000 Series, including the HP Pavilion dv 1658 and 1040 two years later in May 2006, HP began its campaign, The Computer is Personal Again. The campaign was designed to bring back the fact that the PC is a personal product. The campaign utilized viral marketing, sophisticated visuals, and its own web site (www.hp.com/personal). Some of the ads featured well-known personalities, including Pharrell, Petra Nemcova, Mark Burnett, Mark Cuban, Jay-Z, Gwen Stefani, and Shaun White.
On May 13, 2008, HP and Electronic Data Systems announced[25] that they had signed a definitive agreement under which HP would purchase EDS. On June 30, HP announced[26] that the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 had expired. "The transaction still requires EDS stockholder approval and regulatory clearance from the European Commission and other non-U.S. jurisdictions and is subject to the satisfaction or waiver of the other closing conditions specified in the merger agreement." The agreement was finalized on August 26, 2008, and it was publicly announced that EDS would be re-branded "EDS an HP company." As of September 23, 2009, EDS is known as HP Enterprise Services.
On November 11, 2009, 3Com and Hewlett-Packard announced that Hewlett-Packard would be acquiring 3Com for $2.7 billion in cash.[27] The acquisition is one of the biggest in size among a series of takeovers and acquisitions by technology giants to push their way to become one-stop shops. Since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2007, tech giants have constantly felt the pressure to expand beyond their current market niches. Dell purchased Perot Systems recently to invade into the technology consulting business area previously dominated by IBM. Hewlett-Packard's latest move marked its incursion into enterprise networking gear market dominated by Cisco.
On April 28, 2010, Palm, Inc. and Hewlett-Packard announced that HP would be acquiring Palm for 1.2 billion in cash and debt.[28] In the months leading up to the buyout it was rumored that Palm was going to be purchased by either HTC, Dell, RIM or HP. The addition of Palm handsets to the HP product line provides some overlap with the current iPAQ mobile products but will significantly increase their mobile presence as those devices have not been selling well. The addition of Palm brings HP a library of valuable patents as well the mobile operating platform known as webOS.
[edit] Facilities
HP's global operations are directed from its headquarters in Palo Alto, California, USA. Its U.S. operations are directed from its facility in Houston, Texas, USA, the site originally belonging to Compaq, which it acquired. Latin America operations are directed from Miami, Florida, USA, European operations from Geneva, Switzerland, and Asia-Pacific operations from Singapore.[29][30][31] It also has large operations in Boise, Idaho, Roseville, California, San Diego, California, and Plano, Texas (the former headquarters of EDS, which HP acquired). In the UK, HP is based out of a large site in Bracknell, Berkshire with offices in various UK locations, including a landmark office tower in London, 88 Wood Street. Its recent acquisition of 3Com will expand its employee base to Marlborough, Massachusetts.[32]
[edit] Products and organizational structure
HP has successful lines of printers, scanners, digital cameras, calculators, PDAs, servers, workstation computers, and computers for home and small business use computers; many of the computers came from the 2002 merger with Compaq. HP today promotes itself as supplying not just hardware and software, but also a full range of services to design, implement, and support IT infrastructure.
HP's Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) 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."[33] Products and technology associated with IPG include Inkjet and LaserJet printers, consumables and related products, Officejet all-in-one multifunction printer/scanner/faxes, Large Format Printers, Indigo Digital Press, HP Web Jetadmin printer management software, HP Output Management suite of software, LightScribe optical recording technology, HP Photosmart digital cameras and photo printers, HP SPaM, and Snapfish by HP, a photo sharing and photo products service. On December 23, 2008, HP released iPrint Photo for iPhone a free downloadable software application that allows the printing of 4" x 6" photos.[34]
HP's Personal Systems Group (PSG) claims to be "one of the leading vendors of personal computers ("PCs") in the world based on unit volume shipped and annual revenue."[33] PSG includes business PCs and accessories, consumer PCs and accessories, (e.g., HP Pavilion, Compaq Presario, VoodooPC), handheld computing (e.g., iPAQ Pocket PC), and digital "connected" entertainment (e.g., HP MediaSmart TVs, HP MediaSmart Servers, HP MediaVaults, DVD+RW drives). HP resold the Apple iPod until November 2005.[33]
HP Enterprise Business (EB) incorporates Technical services, Enterprise Services (formerly known as EDS), HP Software & Solutions, and Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking Group (ESSN). The Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking Group (ESSN) oversees "back end" products like storage and servers. HP's networking business unit ProCurve is responsible for the family of network switches, wireless access points, and routers.[35] They are currently a business unit of ESSN.
HP Software & Solutions is the company's enterprise software division. For years, HP has produced and marketed its brand of enterprise management software, HP OpenView. HP has purchased a total of 12 software companies as part of a publicized, deliberate strategy to augment its software offerings for large business customers.[36] The division markets its software in four categories: HP IT Management Software (also known as business technology optimization software), HP Information Management Software, business intelligence solutions, and communications and media software and solutions.
HP's Office of Strategy and Technology[37] has four main functions: (1) steering the company's $3.6 billion research and development investment, (2) fostering the development of the company's global technical community, (3) leading the company's strategy and corporate development efforts,[38] and (4) performing worldwide corporate marketing activities. Under this office is HP Labs, the research arm of HP. Founded in 1966, HP Labs's function is to deliver new 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. HP IdeaLab further provides a web forum on early-state innovations to encourage open feedback from consumers and the development community.[39]
HP also offers managed services where they provide complete IT-support solutions for other companies and organisations. Some examples of these are: A large activity is HP offering "Professional Support" and desktop "Premier Support" for Microsoft in the EMEA marketplace. This is done from the Clonskeagh office in Dublin, Sofia and Israel. Support is offered on the line of Microsoft operation systems, Exchange, Sharepoint and some office-applications.[40]. But HP also offers outsourced services for companies like Bank of Ireland, some UK banks, the U.S. defense forces, etc.
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