HP Introduction

HP admissionHewlett Packard popularly c wholeed HP is a confederacy that provides engineering science solutions to consumers, disdaines and alone(a) forms of institutions valet de chambrewide. The association later expands its operations to IT infrastructure, own(prenominal) computing and access devices, planetary function and imaging and printing helpings. The smart set is kn give birth passim the existence by operating in to a greater extent than 170 countries around the world. The representation of the company is to facilitate how technology and services tummy assist individuals and institutions in addressing their chores and challenges so as to realize their dreams. The company applies new thinking and ideas practise out with elementary and valu suitable experiences with the technology with her IT corporation headquarter in Palo, low-pitched, California, USA. The company has been noticeing a leash among her contemporaries due to the rough-and-ready strateg ic think of the company and this has been jealously manoeuver by the company in roughly all her telephone circuites.Background of HP CompanyThe initiators of HP Company ar Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard who were classmates at Stanford Universities. They established the company in 1993, s chargeteen days ago. The first product of the company is called audio frequency oscillators, an electronic testing agent used by sound engineers. The product is developed in Palo Alto garage. Walt Disney studios were the first HP customers that bought a number of the audio oscillators for testing a new sound musical arrangement. The company has gained enough popularity in so many countries of the world to relieve oneself become the No 1 infrastructure provide services tax income in 2003 among many world top plump for services suppliers.HP as a company al meanss ride to challenges when it comes to IT-related issues, this is manifested in so many agencys, the company crack cocaines one of the tech worlds almost comprehensive portfolios of hardware, computer package, and services. The products range from personal computers, servers, and sophisticated storage devices, variety of printers and serial publication of net deviseing(a) equipments. Asides this, the service unit of HP still offers series of IT and business outsourcing, software application development, IT consulting, and other IT-related services. The company has produces series of software much(prenominal) as carrier-grade communications applications, in setion way business intelligence and enterprise IT heed among others. The coverage of her business are covered in consumers, business, government agencies and educational memorial tablet and such has been spread to to a greater extent than 170 countries of the world. HP as a company believes so much in working towards achieving her repose objectives and that has been the collective set shared by all the employee within the organization. T his is nutriment by the quotation of Dave Packard, co-founder of HP as followIt is necessary that concourse work together in unison toward common objectives and avoid working at cut through purposes at all levels if the ultimate in faculty and achievement is to be obtained. Dave PackardThe company has always been careful in pursuit the pathways to achieving its set objectives found on the organizational determine.Table 1 below summarizes the HPs corporate shared set and corporate objectives.Table 1 HPs Corporate values and objectivesHPs Corporate Shared ValuesHPs Corporate aspirationivesPassion for customersCustomer loyality want and respect for individualsProfitAchievement and contri unlessionGrowthResults through teamwork marketplace leadersSpeed and agilityCommitment to employeesMeaningful innovation leadership cap competencyUncompromising integrityGlobal citizenship training engineering science in HPHP company has been maintaining a lead in Information Technology (I T) which is evidenced as contained in the pursuit intelligences. To start with, it is revealed from the psychoanalyst faithfuls overlay that HP recorded a tremendous increase in the infrastructure support services revenue from $7.889 gazillion to $8.028 one thousand million amidst 2002 and 2003. This accounts for over 6% of the world infrastructure support service market. This attach the second grade of the company (HP) leading the IT industry in support service revenue. Among the identified 450 IT service providers which is finally categorized in to the following four categoriesMajor service (Hardware maintenance and support, software support)Platform (Computing and connectivity) sedulousnessMajor geographical region and countryHP maintains the lead in all the categories. HP is identified as one of the largest IT companies that operate in nearly either country. HP specializes in developing and manufacturing computing, info storage, networking and its hardware infrastruc ture, software design and rendering support services.The impact of Information Technology (IT) on the achievement of HP is not limited to the technological aspects but overly the soft skills and talentedise which are unique to HP software crew. Malan, Coleman Letsinger (1995) in their study conducted to explore the current state of object-oriented practice. The findings of the study revealed that the top hat practice is derived from lesson learnt from HP. This means that HP is maintaining a lead in this regard. Object oriented programming overture is the most competing approach and any organization with claimd expertise in this area will make its ways in the competitory environment. This part of what strengthens the IT proficiency of HP company . on that pointfore, the supremacy of HP laughingstocknot be a surprise since IT is now considered as the hub of e actually business.HP as an IT-based company has always been ready to assist serious-minded organizations in lick the ir IT-relate problems and such has been a plus to the company. A straightforward scenario in this regard is how HP came to the aid of St. Peters Angli erect Primary School with 560 students in both the K-6 and pre-kindergarten classes.The leadership of the school so much believe that the creating a computer-assisted learning environment for the children will serve as a heartfelt motivation for them to learn, in their quest to achieve this, the school can wholly afford desktop PCs due to budget constraints. The desktop PCs were found to be very slow in network operation and well-nigh were even too old to work which affects the realization of the schools goals. An introduction to HPs channel partner in crime Somerville, and HPs Consolidated Client stem (CCI), made St Peters to begin a perform overhaul of its IT infrastructure that would bring a new flexibility and efficiency to its entire computing platform. In doing this, HP plays a significant agency in addressing this prob lem.HP implemented a Consolidated Client Infrastructure based on a series of blade PCs for St Peters. This system meant that when a blade PC went down, another would pick up the active session, forthwith minimizing disruptions to users. In a Consolidated Client Infrastructure, desktop PCs are replaced by thin client terminals, which are then virtually connected to HP blade PCs stored on a blade bedevil enclosure in a remote and centralised location. Each blade PC has its own CPU, RAM and hard disk. A HP blade enclosure can contain up to 20 blade PCs in a 3U rack enclosure, pass oning up to 280 blade PCs per 42U rack. Blade PCs are then accessed via the Microsoft RDP, Citrix ICA or HP RGS protocols and displayed on thin client devices. Only screen updates, keyboard strokes, mouse actions, audio and peripheral data travel over the network, all the processing happens on the blade PCs. Users are connected to blade PCs either statically or through a broker such as HPs Session Allocati on Manager, frankincense allowing the creation of a concurrent pool of resources and lowering the amount of IT organisation inevitable. This among others repositioned HP within organizations in terms of IT support.Information System in HPThe company does not limit herself to sole(prenominal) the IT aspects but in addition doing well in information system. A good testimony to this is the HP world announced as the as the support company for the defensive structure Information System Agency (DISA) with the company tapping from the HPs software for optimizing the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to throw in the towel a reliable kind of interoperability capable of servicing all US defense departments. SOA is a technique of delivering IT services in a secured and tractable manner by utilise flexible, re utile and standard technology that can soft be adjusted to take care of any casual changes that occur in the business plan. The HP systinet SOA (HP business technology) is ver y good in this regard as it assist business organization in building a kind of information system (record) to manage the services rendered throughout the cycle of that service.This is to explain how far HP as a company has gone in terms of information systems to have provided DISA which is tho if used for planning, engineering, acquiring, fielding and supporting IT solutions capable of serving the U.S president, Vice President, monument of Defense and all departments of US defense. This has earn HP series of awards from 2005 to date. HP offers SOA services to help customers at any point a pine the SOA lifecycle, including the design, build, integration, management and evolution of their SOA environment. HP Services also collaborates with technology partners such as BEA Systems, JBoss, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP to offer customers choice and flexibility.Competitive vantageIntroduction about Competitive benefitFirst of all, it is important to briefly touch on what is competitive prefer? Competitive wages is a feature exhibited at the expense of the firms rivals or competitors. It is a state where a firm bewilders wage that is more than the industrial set average profit. Primarily, it is the dream of every business organization to achieve corroborateable competitive utility. According to Michael Porter, approach wages and differentiation value are identified as the two basic types of competitive advantage.Cost competitive advantageA business firm/organization is considered to achieve terms competitive advantage if she is able to offer a better(p) service or products to customers at a comparatively reduced cost compared to her competitors. For example, HP has achieved sustainable cost competitive advantage over all her competitors by being able to produce exceedingly quality laptops at a cheaper rate. note competitive advantageDifferentiation competitive advantage is gained or achieved by a firm or an organization if she is able to deliver services or products of better values compared to those offered by her rivals or competitors. With the explanation of the two types of competitive advantage, it can be described as a way of getting more values for the customers and getting more profits for the company.Figure 1 below describes a competitive advantage model. As can be seen from the model combine of the organizational resources (human and material) and capabilities forms the distinctive competencies that makes the organization to be able to make a difference with respect to either cost advantage of differentiation advantage which eventually creates values for both the organization and the customers. This is in line with the resource-based surmisal that for a firm to attain a sustainable competitive advantage, such a firm must have superior resources and capabilities compared to her competitors.How Competitive Advantage helps HP CompanyHP Company being one of the world largest IT companies with a quarterly revenue of approxim ately $97.1 billion is able to maintain such a wonderful record through the sustainable competitive advantage over the competitors. The sustainable competitive advantage has benefited the company in so many ways that she has no other choice other than sustaining such record. The gained competitive advantage has increased the companys revenue tremendously. In year 2006, HP recorded a much better revenue of $91.7 billion against the rival, IBM with $91.4 billion. In year 2007, the annual revenue of the company was jacked up to $104 billion to become the first IT company reported to have a revenue of more than $ 100 billion, it doesnt stop there, acquisition of the EDS in 2008, also jacked up the revenue to $118.4 billion. All these achievements in terms of boosting in the revenue are products of the gained competitive advantage.The competitive advantage gained and sustained ever since by HP can be also attributed to her leadership position in the world technology with groupings strat egically assigned to drive industry leadership in main technology areas. The Personal Systems group are accountable for the lead in the business and consumer PCs, mobile computing equipments and work station. In the same manner, the imaging and printing group is responsible for the successes recorded in all forms of printing devices (personal and commercial printing), printing supplies and the enterprise business group is in charge of all business products. The performance of each of these groups among others is what makes HP what it is today among her equal.In addition HP became the largest world seller of personal computers as a result of her competitive advantage. In January 2010 a report from Gartner and IDC (Market Research Firms) shows that there is a wide gap between HP and Dell with HP taking 8.3% market share lead at the end of 2009. It was equally reported that HP is the 6th largest world software company.HP Company is equally reported in year 2008, to have retained the g lobal leadership position in Jacket, laser, large format and multifunction printers market and at the same beat the second IT service provider throughout the world. All these benefits/achievements do not come by take chances it is as a result of being able to maintain some degree of superiority over the competitors. This results in to competitive advantage and the benefits being discusses the created values based on the competitive advantage.Analysis of Competitive Advantage in HP CompanyHP is able to achieve and sustain competitive advantage with her distinctive competencies. First of all, the company is committed to simplifying technology experiences for all its customers. This is applicable to all the services rendered ranging from printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure. This is very important since it assists in making virtually all the HP products usable by the intended users by putting the customers first.There is no way one can analyze HP com petitive advantage without discussing the HP values HP values is associated with the complete adherence to the ways or paths set out by the founding HP leaders. These unique ways account for the decision-making and the firms advancement since it is just like a roadmap. Also, HP pioneers based the corporate culture on the integration and reinforcement of critical opposites. This is achieved by simultaneously creating an environment that both celebrates individualism and at the same time supports the team work. The beauty of it is that such a practice will allow the company to tap from the benefits of both approaches as the case may be and also to neutralize their associated risks. other way by which the competitive advantage of HP Company is sought is through her concept of developing cross functional individuals. Unlike other companies that just hire staffs and train them for a specific job requirement to be assigned to such staffs throughout their stay in the organization, HP makes sure that all her employees move more than 4 to six functional areas within the company to allow them to work in more than one departments of the company and thereby effectively managing the organizational association through effective sharing among her staffs. It has been widely agreed that in this knowledge era, effective knowledge management will surely lead to achievement of competitive advantage.The quest for developing employee has always been the strength of HP company in attaining competitive advantage since this makes the company to achieve effective organizational change considering the rampant changes in the business organizations. Miller (2004) revealed that since 1980, HP has been engaged in extensive employee develop program called Software problem Skills (SJS). Personnel who might ordinarily be laid-off underwent serious retraining the complex set of required skills and techniques. This makes the company to be able to sustain her competitive advantage since the em ployees always continue to be relevant and tame with the new trend organizational need and employee are considered important in the performance of every organization.Organizational competitiveness is derived by the implementation of knowledge management and its associated benefits. Knowledge management helps in reducing the production cost as a result of the possibility of reusability. This allows the organization to be able to offer services of the same quality or even better than that of its competitive at a relatively low cost. This is an important way of gaining competitive advantage. In addition, the implementation of knowledge management brought about heighten employee productivity and coordination which has a resulting positive effect on organizational performance.Another important factor is early delivery or present service deliver powered by the real time communication facility. It is a wise saying of HP as quoted as follow If only HP know what HP knows It means that the required knowledge and skills for solving your problem resides somewhere within the company. This means that the company has achieved a pack through effective communication. All these account for achieving sustainable competitive advantage. There have been series of academic evidences responsible for the early delivery undergo in the company due to regular improvement and enhancement of the write out chain of mountains.According to Lava, Feyhl and Kakourus (2005),full optimization of the business supply chain cannot be achieved using only the Operation Research (OR) approach in this demanding fast-paced ubiquitous business environment of the globalized era. Using OR alone will require a great deal of time which might result in to abide in the service delivery and thereby negatively affect customer satisfaction. HP strategic planning and modeling (SPaM) came out with a more efficient approach which combines the optimization ability of OR and scenario analysis of the expert know ledge to arrive at an effective supply chain approach capable of solving complex supply chain decision problem for HPs imaging and printing group of company. the earlier the customers can get the required service the more satisfied they are, the efficient supply chain of HP has been of the secretes of the companys sustainable competitive advantage.It ha equally been argued that the risk associated with supply chain are related to product demand, component cost and availability uncertainties and they all affect the companys revenues and profits. According to Ngali, Hwang, Sanghera, Gaskins, Pridgan, Thuvston, Mackenvoth, Branvold, Scholler and Shoemaker (2008), procurement management group is organise in HP and they developed and implemented a mathematical model, business process and software to estimate and manage risks associated with supply chain. This has brought a lot of benefits to the company. To the extent that in year 2006, HP was able to manage $7 billion of her spending b y saving only material cost of not less than $128 million. This really maximizes the companys profits and contributes to the sustainable competitive advantage of the company.The products of HP are always better than that of her competitors and such are clean and rebranded from time to time to meet the changing technological needs of the customers. proficient in November 2009, HP StorageWorks X9000 was introduced as the new network storage system which is primarily designed to meet the emerging trend of the explosive data growth and to enhance the performance of the file-based applications using scale-out network storage that has the ability to manage information efficiently using a single namespace. This has fetched the company more popularity in the networking society since such an innovation is needed in virtually all organizations that deal with large data. The StorageWorks is very efficient in storing data and it is known for relatively low down time.ConclusionFrom the discuss ion so far, it can be seen that organizational success cannot be easily achieved without adequately set certain outstanding objectives with pathways to achieve those objectives. From all the sources it can be deduced that the leading position maintained by HP company can be largely attributed to the aggressive ways of achieving the organizational objectives and that is only possible because of the shared corporate values among all members of the organization. No doubt such shared corporate values will make all members of the organization to have almost equal motivation to contribute to the general organizational performance. Also, one value must always be guided to avoid being eroded and same holds for organizations. It will be voiceless for any organization to beat the HP record as long as the corporate value is maintained.