HP

HP

Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. It provides hardware, software and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises, including customers in the government, health and education sector. 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 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. In the 1990s, HP expanded their computer product line, which initially had been targeted at university, research, and business users, to reach consumers. 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. On September 3, 2001, HP announced that an agreement had been reached with Compaq to merge the two companies. In May, 2002, after passing a shareholder vote, HP officially merged with Compaq. In June 2014, during the HP Discover customer event in Las Vegas, Meg Whitman and Martin Fink announced a project for a radically new computer architecture called The Machine. Based on memristors and silicon photonics, The Machine is supposed to come in commercialization before the end of the decade, meanwhile representing 75% of the research activity in HP Labs.

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 services and consulting business around its products and partner products. In 2013 it was the world's second-largest PC vendor by unit sales. HP produces 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 as of 2001 promotes itself as supplying not just hardware and software, but also a full range of services to design, implement, and support IT infrastructure