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.
ServiceNow is a platform-as-a-service provider of enterprise Service Management software. It was founded in 2003 by Fred Luddy, the previous CTO of Peregrine Systems and Remedy Corporation. ServiceNow specializes in delivering ITSM applications and thus competes with BMC, Computer Associates, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. It also provides a platform for forms-based workflow application development and thus competes with SaaS/PaaS providers such as Salesforce.com's Force.com offering. Slootman has specifically indicated this as a key corporate strategy in press interviews and keynotes at the ServiceNow user conferences called Knowledge.
