The Hewlett-Packard Company is an American global information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. It develops and provides a wide variety of hardware components as well as software and related services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including customers in the government, health and education sectors. The company was founded in a one-car garage in Palo Alto by William "Bill" Redington Hewlett and David "Dave" Packard starting with a line of electronic test equipment. HP was the world's leading PC manufacturer from 2007 to Q2 2013, after which Lenovo remained ranked ahead of HP. It specializes in developing and manufacturing computing, data storage, and networking hardware, designing software and delivering services. Major product lines include personal computing devices, enterprise and industry standard servers, related storage devices, networking products, software and a diverse range of printers and other imaging products. HP markets its products to households, small- to medium-sized businesses and enterprises directly as well as via online distribution, consumer-electronics and office-supply retailers, software partners and major technology vendors. HP also has services and consulting business around its products and partner products.
Red Hat, Inc. is an American multinational software company providing open-source software products to the enterprise community. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with satellite offices worldwide. Red Hat has become associated to a large extent with its enterprise operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux and with the acquisition of open-source enterprise middleware vendor JBoss. Red Hat also offers Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, an enterprise virtualization product. Red Hat provides storage, operating system platforms, middleware, applications, management products, and support, training, and consulting services.