Tales of Innovation III: Hewlett Packard

Last October 2003 at Gartner ITExpo (NYSE:IT) I had the opportunity to listen to Carly Fiorina (HP CEO) talking about HP (NYSE: HPQ) challenges on corporate strategy and how the company has redefined its way to deliver value to the customers. The core concept is contained in what she called HP Adaptive Enterprise which links three key architectures of the IT Strategy: deliver real time to the enterprise by integrating processes, applications and infrastructures horizontally. Fiorina joined HP in 1999 coming from AT&T where she was responsible for the spin-off and transformation of Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU) . She is the first woman to held the CEO position in the DOW 30 Index, and was selected among other 300 candidates. Although, the previous HP CEO, Lewis Platt, was responsible during the 90's for making HP in a more global and diverse company, he failed to speed up the company during the Internet bubble and compete with other industry giants such as IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW). Fiorina came to reinvent the company leading the successful acquisition of Compaq Computer for $19 billion, and developing a new business line based on consulting services. There are many success stories showing how other companies benefit from the new HP vision; as an example, the online retailer Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has managed to reduce 20% IT costs by using HP technologies, New York Stock Exchange handles more than 2000 messages per second on non-stop infrastructures, BMW WilliamsF1 uses HP technology to control the car performance during the race, and so on.