Hewlett-Packard

HP, or the Hewlett-Packard Development Company, is the world's largest information technology corporation. It has a global presence in the fields of computing, printing, and digital imaging, and also provides software and services.

The company has made significant investments to advance clustering, virtualisation, utility computing, Web services, security and enterprise management. HP supports open, vendor-neutral standards and technology to make grid more broadly adaptable. An HP executive heads the Open Grid Forum, an organization formed by the merger of the Global Grid Forum, the grid standards body that is developing the widely-endorsed Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA); and the Enterprise Grid Alliance, formed to advance the use of grids in the enterprise. HP co-founded other key standards organisations, including the Globus Consortium, to facilitate enterprise use of the Globus Toolkit.

HP provides a set of Utility Computing Services. One of them is the Flexible Computing Service. It is a portfolio of services, most of them including hardware infrastructure and operating system (middleware) installation and management from HP professionals. This happens in order to deliver consistent and reliable service levels. Therefore -like public gas and electric utilities- services are supplied from and administered by a central outside entity. Direct access to highly available data centre computing, based on industry-standard platforms and resources is provided. The users also profit from HP security, management, and applications know-how. And they pay only for the cycles they use.

A second service is HP Utility Pricing. It offers a practical, cost-effective approach that makes aligning resources with fluctuating demand remarkably simple. HP Utility Pricing Solutions integrate HP technology, services, and financing to deliver IT resources when and where needed with payment based on usage. There are two solutions: Instant Capacity (activation-based pricing) and Metered Capacity (pay-per-use pricing).

Further Information

http://www.answers.com/topic/hewlett-packard-company?cat=biz-fin

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/125369-0-0-0-121.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP