Technology giant Hewlett-Packard revealed an overhaul of its software business last week, demonstrating a long-awaited realignment towards e-business.
Poor company results released two days later, in which sales were shown down 59 per cent on the same quarter last year, demonstrated why the announcement could be crucial to the $48 billion company's survival. Net income fell to $328 million, from $794 million.
Overall, though, HP's results were generally in line with Wall Street's expectations. The company warned it expected weaker growth than predicted in 2001.
Hewlett-Packard employs 88,500 worldwide and 2,400 in Ireland, primarily at its printer cartridge plant in Leixlip.
Chief executive, Ms Carly Fiorina, who addressed the press announcement of the new software portfolio by taped video, said HP will now offer its corporate customers a "new architecture" which is "servercentric". It is a move "from a do-it-yourself model to a do-it-for-me model", said Ms Fiorina.
The company also announced 25 new applications in a move to broaden its software division. These include suites of applications that enable online business procedures, such as billing, website management, security, remote access and storage.
"This is a major launch we're embarking on," said Mr Bill Russell, vice-president of HP's software division.
HP said it intended to be a neutral software provider, offering a bridge between applications from the Microsoft.net platform and those based on Sun's rival Java programming language. "XML [a standard for describing data] will enable a bridge," said Mr Duane Zitzner, president of computing software.
According to Mr Kevin Kilroy, vice-president and general manager of HP's middleware division, "HP is the Switzerland of software providers - we are vendor-neutral. We will standardise on standards, not on vendors."
HP believes its other software advantage is modularity. Software applications will be available as add-on units and will work independently or in tandem with other units, allowing customers to build out a system.
Some major software suites require companies to invest in a massive package with multiple capabilities, many of which remain unused.
HP is widely believed to have come late - many analysts believe dangerously late - to the e-business software and services table. While for most of the past decade the corporate world turned increasingly to Web-based internal and external operations, HP continued to focus on its sprawling range of hardware, from laptops to printers to, perhaps oddly, scientific instruments (its original product focus in the 1930s).
The company has not been considered a software innovator and its portfolio of software products has been patchy and varied, although software constitutes an important $2 billion business for HP, according to Mr Zitzner. However, that represents only 5 per cent of HP's total revenue, which still comes primarily from computers and printers.
But Ms Fiorina has led a total revamp and restructuring of one of the world 's technology pioneers. The new shape of HP's software division reflects Ms Fiorina's overall strategy of simplifying and redefining the company's structure and product range.
Under the reorganisation, all software products have been streamlined into two families, called Netaction and Openview, and its middleware - or infrastructure - applications have been beefed up by HP's recent $450 million acquisition of Philadelphia-based software company Bluestone.
Since taking over a year ago, Ms Fiorina has also taken the company's electronic instruments arm and spun it off as the highly successful company, Agilent, taken HP's former swarm of internal divisions and work groups and narrowed them to a handful of broad departments, and toyed with, but rejected, acquiring services giant PriceWaterhouseCooper.
Analysts believe the software announcement is an important move for the company, especially as computer sales worldwide slow.
