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.
Founded in 1969, Software AG is an enterprise software company with over 10,000 enterprise customers in over 70 countries. The company is the second largest software vendor in Germany, the seventh largest in Europe. Software AG is traded on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the symbol SOW and part of the technology index TecDAX. The company was founded in 1969 by a group of six young employees at the consulting firm AIV. ADABAS was launched in 1971 as a high performance transactional database management system. In 1979 Natural, a 4GL application development language, was launched. The company continued to open offices and subsidiaries in North America, Japan, UK, France, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and Saudi Arabia. By 1987 Software AG had around 500 employees, 12 subsidiaries in Europe and offices in more than 50 countries. In 1999 Software AG was listed on Frankfurt Stock Exchange and soon after the company released Tamino Information Server and Tamino XML Server.