The Open Source movement is forcing established technology companies to re-evaluate their business strategies. Hewlett Packard is among the most progressive in this regard.
Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) is not the first technology company that most people would think of to play the role of strong corporate champion of Open Source Software. HP’s reputation, such as it is, is that of a perfectly respectable but somewhat gray corporation. The company’s technology is strong but not showy, and its products tend to be found in conservative corporate and laboratory settings, rather than in the freewheeling academic (much less hacker) communities where Open Source has its roots. For a company as button-down as HP, Linux, Perl, Apache and the rest of the lot all seem a little too unzipped.
It is a tribute both to the strong grassroots pull of Open Source, as well as a new sense of adventure and risk-taking inside HP itself, that the company has become an aggressive backer of Open Source in recent months. On March 1 at the LinuxWorld Expo, HP announced the creation of their Open Source Solutions Operation (OSSO), which will work to drive Linux adoption in enterprise and Internet software-development environments. HP hopes to pull this off by providing the tools, technologies, and solutions to facilitate application development on Linux.
HP is a diverse and distributed company with many autonomous business units. When Wayne Caccamo, director of HP’s OSSO, first got involved in pulling together HP’s Linux strategy (after doing an inventory of HP’s current Linux capabilities and offerings), it was clear to…
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