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.
Riverbed Technology, Inc. is an American company founded in 2002 with the goal of reducing the latency and bandwidth constraints in delivering applications via wide area networks to multiple locations across long distances. Riverbed is known primarily for pioneering WAN Optimization with Riverbed SteelHead, which first shipped in 2004 and continues to lead the market with over 50% market share. As information technology has evolved over the past decade and begun to move to the cloud, Riverbed has also evolved: Businesses increasingly rely on applications and data that run both in on-premises data centers as well as in the cloud, delivered to users over a mix of private networks and public networks. This is the hybrid enterprise, and Riverbed offers a platform to give enterprises visibility to deliver, control, and optimize IT resources across this hybrid enterprise.
