HP 2009 Annual Report Download - page 18

be adversely impacted by market anticipation of seasonal trends. See ‘‘Risk Factors—Our sales cycle
makes planning and inventory management difficult and future financial results less predictable,’’ in
Item 1A, which is incorporated herein by reference.
Competition
We encounter aggressive competition in all areas of our business activity. We compete primarily on
the basis of technology, performance, price, quality, reliability, brand, reputation, distribution, range of
products and services, ease of use of our products, account relationships, customer training, service and
support, security and availability of application software and our Internet infrastructure offerings.
The markets for each of our business segments are characterized by vigorous competition among
major corporations with long-established positions and a large number of new and rapidly growing
firms. Product life cycles are short, and to remain competitive we must develop new products and
services, periodically enhance our existing products and services and compete effectively on the basis of
the factors listed above. In addition, we compete with many of our current and potential partners,
including OEMs that design, manufacture and often market their products under their own brand
names. Our successful management of these competitive partner relationships will continue to be
critical to our future success. Moreover, we anticipate that we will have to continue to adjust prices on
many of our products and services to stay competitive.
On a revenue basis we are the largest company offering our range of general purpose computers
and personal information, imaging and printing products for industrial, scientific, business and
consumer applications, and IT services. We are the leader or among the leaders in each of our
principal business segments.
The competitive environments in which each segment operates are described below:
Enterprise Storage and Servers. The areas in which ESS operates are intensely competitive and are
characterized by rapid and ongoing technological innovation and price reductions. Our competitors
range from broad solution providers such as International Business Machines Corporation (‘‘IBM’’) to
more focused competitors such as EMC Corporation (‘‘EMC’’) and Network Appliance, Inc. in storage
and Dell, Inc. (‘‘Dell’’) in industry standard servers. We believe that our important competitive
advantages in this segment include the six technology components of our converged infrastructure
initiatives: IT systems, power and cooling, security, management, virtualization and automation. We
believe that our competitive advantages also include our global reach and our significant intellectual
property portfolio and research and development capabilities, which will contribute to further
enhancements of our product and service offerings and our ability to cross-sell our portfolio and
leverage scale advantages in everything from brand to procurement leverage.
Services. Our service businesses including HP Enterprise Services and Technology Services
compete in IT support services, consulting and integration, infrastructure technology outsourcing,
business process outsourcing and application services. The IT support services and consulting and
integration markets have been under significant pressure as our customers have reduced their IT
budgets. However, this trend has benefited the outsourcing services business as customers drive toward
lower IT management costs to enable more strategic investments. Our competitors include IBM Global
Services, Computer Sciences Corporation, systems integration firms such as Accenture Ltd. and
offshore companies such as Fujitsu and India-based competitors Wipro Ltd, Infosys Technologies Ltd.
and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. We also compete with other traditional hardware providers, such as
Dell, which are increasingly offering services to support their products. Many of our competitors are
able to offer a wide range of global services, and some of our competitors enjoy significant brand
recognition. Our service businesses team with many companies to offer services, and those
arrangements allow us to extend our reach and augment our capabilities. Our competitive advantages
are evident in our deep technology expertise, which includes multi-vendor environments, virtualization
11