HP gets Mickey Mouse marketing man
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The HP-iest job on Earth HP has appointed a long-time Disney executive, Michael Mendenhall, as its new marketing boss.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard (HP) is offering a "virtual house call" service to users who have trouble getting their PCs to work HP Instant Care, announced Monday, provides personalized service over the Internet. Customers can sit at their home PCs while remote workers defragment a hard drive or speed up booting time by deleting extra files in the Start Up menu. HP's move follows remote IT services offered to business customers by Dell Inc. and Intel Corp. As PC prices continue to fall, some vendors are using improved customer service to differentiate their products in a crowded marketplace. Dell has been expanding its customer service in an effort to turn around poor earnings results. In June, the company launched "DellConnect", an expansion of its TechConnect service allowing Dell service agents to troubleshoot customers' PCs using a broadband Internet link instead of a personal visit. Dell claims the approach will save time and money compared to the cost of dispatching technicians. Likewise, remote monitoring is one of the cornerstones of Intel's vPro technology bundle for business desktops, launched in September. One ingredient of the bundle, Intel's Active Management Technology, allows IT managers to make fewer time-consuming "desk-side" visits by booting and repairing PCs remotely. HP, Gateway Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd. have adopted the vPro platform in their business desktops. Dell offers a similar package in the OptiPlex 745 PC. HP Instant Care is free for HP customers whose computers are still under warranty and have purchased either PC Tune-up for $99 or SmartFriend for $59.99. Â
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HP (NYSE:HPQ)(Nasdaq:HPQ) today announced that Mark Hurd, HP chief executive officer and president, has been appointed to the additional role of chairman, succeeding Patricia Dunn, who is leaving the company's board, effective immediately.
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Hewlett-Packard Co  said  on Monday it is launching a $300 million marketing campaign to  promote Web-based printing services as it seeks new uses for  printers, the company's most-profitable business.
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Electronics firm will support HP's rewritable DVD technology and separately partner with Microsoft on digital rights management.
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HP (NYSE:HPQ) (Nasdaq:HPQ) today announced that Mark Hurd, HP chief executive officer and president, will lead a press conference on Friday, Sept. 22, at 1:05 p.m. PT, to discuss the actions HP is taking to address issues regarding the investigation of leaks from its boardroom.
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Microsoft has tapped a former executive at Walt Disney to fill its CIO position, a move that shows the company continuing to fill top executive positions from outside the company.
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Microsoft has tapped a former executive at Walt Disney to fill its CIO position, a move that shows the company continuing to fill top executive positions from outside the company.Tony Scott, who most recently was CIO at Walt Disney, will take over that same role at Microsoft in February, reporting to Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner. Scott, who also will be a corporate vice president at Microsoft, replaces Stuart Scott, who&#160;departed the company in November. The two are not related.Scott will manage Microsoft&#39;s 4,000-person IT organization, which is responsible for all of the technology systems supporting the company&#39;s worldwide sales, marketing, and services operations, as well as the enterprise systems and applications for all corporate processes.At Disney, where he was senior vice president in addition to CIO, Scott was the first CIO to manage the entire company&#39;s IT systems, according to Microsoft. Prior to Disney, Scott was CTO at General Motors and vice president of operations at Bristol-Meyers Squibb.There are a lot of new faces in the ranks of upper management at Microsoft, with a rash of them signing on to the company in the last six months. Just last week Microsoft revealed that company veteran Jeff Raikes, president of its Business Division, will&#160;leave the company in September. The company tapped an outside executive -- former Juniper Networks, Macromedia, and Adobe executive Stephen Elop -- to fill that role.Other new hires to the company since last July include: Dan Reed, Microsoft Research director of scalable and multicore computing in November; Robert Youngjohns, president of North American sales and marketing and corporate vice president in November; Brian McAndrews, senior vice president, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group in August; and Don Mattick, senior vice president, Interactive Entertainment Business in July.There is likely more new blood to come as Microsoft also confirmed last week several other executive departures: Bruce Jaffe, corporate vice president of corporate development; Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft&#39;s general manager of platform strategy; and&#160;Rob Short, corporate vice president of the Windows Core Technology group.Apart from CEO Steve Ballmer and Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft&#39;s entertainment and devices division, many of the company&#39;s other top executives have joined the company in the past three years. They include the man widely seen as Gates&#39; successor, Chief Architect Ray Ozzie, who joined Microsoft in 2005. Kevin Turner, Microsoft&#39;s chief operating officer, and Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of Microsoft&#39;s Online Services Group, also joined the company that year.
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Been there, seen that HP's freshest board member Ken Thompson won't need to take the company's Pretexting 101 course offering. As Wachovia's CEO, Thompson has become well acquainted with the legal concerns surrounding phone record fraud.â¦
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Poor power play Intel third horseman Andy Grove has chastised HP for its recent management shakeup. The printing, imaging and spying company should not have elevated CEO Mark Hurd to the Chairmanship, according to Intel's ex-top dog.â¦
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Meet the main characters in the corporate saga unfolding at HP.
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The ProCurve networking division of Hewlett-Packard Co is targeting enterprise customers more aggressively with the announcement of a 'framework for all our product introductions for the next three to four years,' according to John McHugh, its VP and worldwide GM.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett Packard's acquisition of Web applications security specialist SPI Dynamics on June 19 illustrates a growing demand among enterprise customers to have vulnerability-scanning tools integrated into their software development platforms. Following closely behind IBM's June 6 acquisition of Watchfire, one of Atlanta-based SPI's closest rivals in the Web applications and software code-scanning space, the HP buyout highlights the rapidly emerging trend toward integration of security testing tools into the software development process. HP, which acquired software development giant Mercury Interactive for $4.5 billion in cash in July 2006 in a move that greatly expanded its interests in the area, said that it plans to blend SPI's business and its 140 person staff into the software unit at its Technology Solutions Group, the division responsible for its server and storage products, as well as its IT consulting services. In response to the growing threat of attacks on applications-level vulnerabilities, the company said, more customers than ever before are building security testing requirements into their development projects. By folding applications security testing into its existing portfolio of tools, HP officials said, the company has added an increasingly strategic piece of the overall software development puzzle. "This adds a new chapter to the applications side of the house; we think of applications and [IT] operations working together, and this adds the piece of security assessment from early on in the [software development] lifecycle all the way through to production," said Jonathan Rende, vice president of products for the Quality Management Software group at HP. "This is a new dimension of that, that is so complementary because there is a whole set of users who are getting involved in security assessment in the lifecycle," Rende said on a conference call with media and analysts. "There are security experts who determine policies and prepare applications before they go live, but then there are also the developers and quality assurance professionals who need to ensure security before the applications go live." In a research report published by market analysis firm Gartner in May 2007, industry experts said that by 2009, some 80 percent of major software development lifecycle vendors would offer source code security scanning tools as part of their platforms. The company said that further that 60 percent of IT organizations will have made vulnerability detection an integral part of their development process by 2010. HP's move to buy SPI and IBM's acquisition of Watchfire provide tacit evidence that those predictions are already coming to pass, said Joseph Feiman, the Gartner analyst who authored the report. "In a span of two weeks, two of the largest applications security companies have been acquired by development platform providers, which proves that users of those platforms understand that having applications security as a discipline is as important to them as network or operational security," said Feiman. "This is the part of security that is being built into applications by customers, and it should be an integral part of these [software development] platforms to allow them to do that work." In addition to appeasing customers who are already calling for integrated applications security testing tools, the HP-SPI and IBM-Watchfire deals should increase the trend toward software developers making security auditing part of their everyday work, the analyst said. SPI has been a longtime partner of HP, which has offered its tools as a package with its Mercury and OpenView software development products -- just as Watchfire had been selling its applications security products packaged with IBM's Rational code-authoring tools before getting snapped-up by the firm. Both platform providers' moves to bring security testing capabilities under their own control should benefit their individual marketing efforts and customers' development lifecycle plans, other analysts said. "SPI had integration with Mercury from a partner standpoint, but that type of a relationship is never as tight as it is within a product suite produced by the same company, and SPI will now be able to take better advantage of HP's installed base of customers," said Dr. Chenxi Wang, analyst with Forrester Research. "Mercury is the leader of the quality testing market, and customers are increasingly making vulnerability testing a part of that type of work, as opposed to an afterthought, so it makes a lot of sense of HP to make this type of deal," Wang said. One of the most significant benefits of adding SPI in particular is that it has both Web applications inspection and source code scanning tools in-house in the form of its WebInspect and DevInspect product lines respectively, along with its own QAInspect quality assurance tools, said the analyst. SPI's combination of code and applications analysis software may give HP an advantage over its rivals, including IBM, Wang said, as she cited Watchfire's forte as based in pure Web applications assessment -- work typically done by quality and assurance testers -- not in technologies built specifically for use by applications developers. "HP has a commitment to pushing this type of security technology deeper into the development lifecycle, integrating with Mercury now makes a lot of sense to their long-term vision," said Wang -- who has worked previously for the HP Labs research group as an independent consultant. "Having SPI's development-phase tools may give HP a leg-up over IBM-Watchfire; HP wants to be selling these types of tools directly to developers, not QA testers." According to a report issued earlier this month by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency that develops technology standards, some 92 percent of all IT security vulnerabilities exist in software applications, which Wang cited as an "astounding" figure. With customers clamoring for a way to reduce their risk to such issues, HP and IBM have seen the business opportunity and moved to address it, she said. Other industry watchers noted that it will become increasingly difficult for standalone applications security providers to compete with the tools being integrated by companies with powerful development arms like HP and IBM. SPI Chief Executive Brian Cohen said he believes it will be hard for such companies to compete in light of the demand for integration with development platforms. To highlight the point, the CEO alluded to the fact that it may have been tough for SPI to maintain its partnership with IBM -- with whom its products have also been packaged for sale and consumption -- in light of the Watchfire deal. "Our belief was that the ultimate success of SPI would be to see our technology integrated into a broadly distributed platform sold to software developers, and it is clear that organizations such as HP feel the same way," Cohen said. "I don't see a standalone business long-term without integration for these types of technologies." However, officials with SPI rivals like Cenzic said that while security testing is being built into the software development process, there are still millions of applications already in production that will need vulnerability assessment tools that aren't tied to one development platform or another. "There are 50 to 100 million Web applications out there, and less than one percent is being tested for security vulnerabilities, so the scope of the opportunity is still huge outside of development," said Mandeep Khera, vice president of marketing for Cenzic. "Everyone in this industry has been hoping to have developers and quality assurance groups buying our products, but that's not really happening yet; there has been a big movement with more people budgeting for these tools over the last nine months, but there's still a long way to go." Cenzic has existing relationships with both HP and IBM, and Khera said that he believes the firm will be able to continue to market itself to those companies' customers, in particular those firms who use both development platforms or want to keep applications security testing as a separate process. HP officials said that the SPI buyout will not preclude it from continuing to work with its other existing vulnerability assessment partners. While Khera said that there may come a time when Cenzic considers a sale to a larger software development or security player if the timing is right, the executive maintains that his company has no immediate plans to begin marketing itself for acquisition. However, some industry watchers see the HP-SPI and IBM-Watchfire deals as a sure sign that additional consolidation is on tap across the applications security and software quality assurance segments. "The game isn't over; there will probably be a few more acquisitions as the securing of applications is becoming a function of applications development, so it's likely that development platforms and tool suites become the home for more of these products and companies," said Jon Oltsik, analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. "It's hard to sell security testing tools after-the-fact. Customers and vendors really do want to introduce this into initial sale of development tools, it broadens your portfolio if you're HP or IBM, and you can push security up as a priority to developers," he said. "These companies had a tough time selling their tools as standalone products, and as a result, I'd expect to see more of these deals."
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Locked and loaded PC supplier Packard Bell are to jointly marketâ¦
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Hewlett-Packard Co., one of the top private employers in Greater Sacramento, on Friday rolled out an array of new products to expand into consumer digital-entertainment and digital-photography categories, including a home theater computer and its own
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MCI CEO Michael Capellas might be looking for a new job. His former employer, No. 2 PC maker Hewlett-Packard, needs a CEO. Is it a perfect match? Not necessarily, tech analysts say.
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Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft have sealed a three-year, $300 million deal to jointly market their products to enterprise customers.