Hewlett-Packard
The company was founded in a one-car garage in Palo Alto by William (Bill) Redington Hewlettand Dave Packard. Currently, HP is the world's leading PC manufacturer, operating in nearly every country. It specializes in developing and manufacturing computing, data storage, and networking hardware, designing software and delivering services. Major product lines include personal computing devices, enterprise, and industry standard servers, related storage devices, networking products, software and 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 also has strong services and consulting business around its products and partner products.
Major company events have included the spin-off of part of its business as Agilent Technologiesin 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.[2] In November 2009, HP announced the acquisition of 3Com;[3] with the deal closing on April 12, 2010.[4] On April 28, 2010, HP announced the buyout of Palm for $1.2 billion.[5] On September 2, 2010, won its bidding war for 3PAR with a $33 a share offer ($2.07 billion) which Dell declined to match.[6]
Hewlett-Packard is not affiliated with Packard Motor Car Corporation, founded by James Ward Packard and William Doud Packard .
Founding
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.[7] In 1939, Packard and Hewlett established Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Packard's garage with an initial capital investment of US$538.[8] Hewlett and Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett[9] 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.
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 incandescent light bulb (known as a "pilot light") as a temperature dependent resistor in a critical portion of the circuit, the negative feedback loop which stabilized the amplitude of the output sinusoidal waveform. 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.
One of the company's earliest customers was Walt Disney Productions, 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.
Early years
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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.
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.
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.[10] HP bought Yokogawa Electric's share of Hewlett-Packard Japan in 1999.[11]
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 a reverse reflect image of the logo "dy" of the new company. Eventually Dynac changed to Dymec, then was folded back into HP in 1959.[12] 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 x86architecture 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.
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. The HP 2640 series included one of the first bit mapped graphics displays that when combined with the HP 2100 21MX F-Series microcoded Scientific Instruction Set[13] enabled the first commercial WYSIWYG Presentation Program, BRUNO that later became the program HP-Draw on the HP 3000. 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.[14]
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.[15] 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.
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 firsthandheld 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.[16] 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]
The 2000s
On September 3, 2001, HP announced that an agreement had been reached with Compaq to merge the two companies.[20] 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.[21]
In 1998 Compaq had already taken over the Digital Equipment Corporation. That is why HP still offers support for PDP-11, VAX and AlphaServer.
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 indesktops, 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, Alicia Keys, Jay-Z, Gwen Stefani, and Shaun White.[citation needed]
On May 13, 2008, HP and Electronic Data Systems announced[22] that they had signed a definitive agreement under which HP would purchase EDS. On June 30, HP announced[23] 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.[24]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.
The 2010s
On April 28, 2010, Palm, Inc. and Hewlett-Packard announced that HP would be acquiring Palm for $1.2 billion in cash and debt,[25] 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. On July 1, 2010, the acquisition of Palm was final.[26] The purchase of Palm, Inc.'s webOS began a big gamble – to build HP's own ecosystem.[27] On July 1, 2011, HP launched its first tablet named HP TouchPad, bringing webOS to tablet devices. On September 2, 2010, won its bidding war for 3PAR with a $33 a share offer ($2.07 billion) which Dell declined to match.
On August 6, 2010, CEO Mark Hurd resigned amid controversy and CFO Cathie Lesjak assumed the role of interim CEO. On September 30, 2010, Léo Apotheker was named as HP's new CEO and President.[28]
Apotheker’s appointment sparked a strong reaction from Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison,[29]who complained that Apotheker had been in charge of SAP when one of its subsidiaries was systematically stealing software from Oracle. SAP accepted that its subsidiary, which has now closed, illegally accessed Oracle intellectual property.[30]
On August 18, 2011 HP announced that it would strategically exit the smartphone and tablet computer business, focusing on higher-margin "strategic priorities of cloud, solutions and software with an emphasis on enterprise, commercial and government markets"[31] They also contemplated spinning off their personal computer division into a separate company.[32] HP's fundamental restructuring to quit the 'PC' business, while continuing to sell servers and other equipment to business customers, was similar to what IBM did in 2005.[33]
On September 22, 2011, Hewlett-Packard Co. named former eBay Inc. Chief Executive Meg Whitman its president and CEO, replacing Léo Apotheker, while Raymond Lane became executive chairman of the company.[34]
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; 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."[42] Products and technology associated with IPG include Inkjet and LaserJet printers, consumables and related products, Officejet all-in-one multifunction printer/scanner/faxes, Designjet and Scitex Large Format Printers, Indigo Digital Press, HP Web Jetadmin printer management software, HP Output Management suite of software, LightScribe optical recording technology, HP Photosmartdigital 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.[43]
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."[42] 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.[42]
HP Enterprise Business (EB) incorporates HP Technology Services, Enterprise Services (an amalgamation of the former EDS, and what was known as HP Services), HP Enterprise Security Services oversees professional services such as network security, information security and information assurance/ compliancy, HP Software Division, 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 unitProCurve is responsible for the family of network switches, wireless access points, and routers.[44] They are currently a business unit of ESSN.
HP Software Division is the company's enterprise software unit. For years, HP has produced and marketed its brand of enterprise management software, HP OpenView. From September 2005 through 2010, HP purchased a total of 15 software companies between as part of a publicized, deliberate strategy to augment its software offerings for large business customers.[45] HP Software sells three categories of software: IT performance management, IT management software and information management software. HP Software also provides consulting, Software as a service, cloud computing solutions, education and support services.
HP's Office of Strategy and Technology[46] 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,[47] 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.[48]
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 Leixlip campus near Dublin, Sofia and Israel. Support is offered on the line of Microsoft operation systems, Exchange, Sharepoint and some office-applications.[49] But HP also offers outsourced services for companies like Bank of Ireland, some UK banks, the U.S. defense forces, etc.
Brand
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According to a Business Week Study, HP is currently the world's 11th most valuable brand.[72] Since its creation, the HP Logo has remained largely the same. Because of its extreme simplicity, the logo is recognized all over the world.
HP has many sponsorships. One well known sponsorship is of Walt Disney World's Epcot Park'sMission: SPACE.[73] From 1995 to 1999 they were the shirt sponsor of Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur F.C..[citation needed] From 1997 to 1999 they were sponsors of Australian Football Leagueclub North Melbourne Football Club.[citation needed] They also sponsored the BMW WilliamsFormula 1 team until 2006 (a sponsorship formerly held by Compaq), and as of 2010 sponsorRenault F1.[citation needed] Hewlett-Packard also has the naming rights arrangement for the HP Pavilion at San Jose, home of the San Jose Sharks NHL hockey team.
After the acquisition of Compaq in 2002, HP has maintained the "Compaq Presario" brand on low-end home desktops and laptops, 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.)[74]
HP uses DEC's "StorageWorks" brand on storage systems; Tandem's "NonStop" servers are now branded as "HP Integrity NonStop".[75]
