Management

Greetings and welcome to Management Perspective. If you are a regular reader of HP Computer lipdate,you will notice that thiscolumn is an addition to the usual format. And you willsee more additions as you browse through future issues. Why? Because we heard you.

About two months ago, members of our sales force came to us and

spoke up on your behalf. They said that you want more information about Hewlett-Packard's strategy for meeting your computing needs. You want to know how HP has helped people like yourselves solve business problems. Many of you have hardware, networking, or application needs that you don't even know we can address. What can we do about that? Our answer is threefold: Management Perspective-a montldy article covering a particular aspect of Hewlett-Packard's con~putingstrategy from our upper management team; a new feature article focusing on what that strategy means to you; and the addition of monthly success stories demonstrating how that strategy helped customers.

As the author of the premiere Management Perspective article, I'd like to begin by previewingfor you some of the basic components of the strategy we're pursuing in the 1990s. Some will undoubtedly sound familiar, being a continuation of the things we did right in the 1980s.

PA-RISC remains the cornerstone of our hardware success. We started delivering RISC-based minicomputers in 1986 and currently remain the only vendor to provide multiuser systems that take advantage of this technology. Last March we shocked the industry with the introduction of our

HP Apollo 9000 Series 700 RISC workstations, and today boast performance leadership at every critical workstation price point. Our past and future commitments to this technology will continue to make it possible for most of our installed base to keep moving forward and benefit from the RISC revolution.

During 1992, we also will continue our leadership in and support of industry standards. Briefly, we will support the creation of industry standards by active participation in

standards groups; we will base our innovations on existing standards so you can take advantage of the new capabilities; and where no standard exists and we have ploughed new ground technologically, we will make that innovation available to others. We also will continue to deliver open systems solutions with greater performance and lower costs. And we'll make them easier to use and configure in multivendor environments. We're already delivering software infrastructure products to help you build, manage, and use distributed open systems. As a result, developers are dramatically reducing their development costs and improvingtheir time to market. Also, our Open Systems Environment provides you with the assistance you need to break through the barriers to open systems.

Of course, hardware performance and multivendor capabili- ties aren't the only important customer needs today. That's why our strategy for the 1990s still includes establishing and maintainingstrong and successful relatio hips with a wide selection of best-in-class applications providers. We already have 2,300 HP 3000 applications, nearly 2,000 workstations- specific applications, more than 3,600 worldwide HP-UX applications, and plans to add additional popular commercial applications.

Finally, our strategy for the 1990s will continue toinclude a strong emphasis on the client/server computing model. We believe it has sign cant enterprisewide customer benefits, including better access to information and resources across applications and geographies, less data redundancy and better data integrity, faster application development and easier maintenance, greater flexibility in configuring systems, and the potential to tap specialized resources on the network. We already have the main components for client/ server computing-super clients and servers, technologies like NCS, WP NewWave Office, PC integration, development tools, and applications. We're adding four new client/server development tools as weU as three new applications, and you can expect more in the months ahead.

Like the changes we're making to HP Computer Update, our

strategy for the 1990s is, in large part, a conscious response ns

to you and your needs. And it is our plan and hope that you will eQoy the changes, benefit from the strategies, and say with conviction that Hewlett-Packard heard us.

Lew Platt, Executive Vice President

Computer Systems Organization

HP Computer Updatr, March 1992