HP Expands Storage Partner Program to Help Customers Better Manage Information

PALO ALTO, Calif., Dec. 6, 2005, HP today announced that it has expanded its storage partner program to provide customers with advanced solutions that capture, manage and deliver information throughout its lifecycle.

The enhanced Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Partner Program helps partners expand market reach and offers increased access to HP’s worldwide sales and marketing organization.

The program now includes three levels of technical and marketing integration so partners can easily access and leverage the market leadership of HP. Partners can accelerate their time to market through the use of HP ILM integration tools, technologies and services, and they can increase their revenue potential through HP’s go-to-market services.

Through the program, HP and its partners will deliver enterprise-wide solutions based on industry standards so customers can deal with the explosive growth of digital content. In addition, customers benefit from easily implemented solutions that use partner self-qualified applications and HP technologies.

“Customers increasingly want to capitalize on the vast amounts of data that they are storing and turn it into a business advantage,” said Frank Harbist, vice president and general manager of ILM and storage software, StorageWorks Division, HP. “Unlike storage-only vendors, HP and its partners can provide customers with a complete portfolio of industry-standard technology that allows them to control and access their information from a broad range of devices and applications.”

HP and partner collaboration benefits customers

HP works with partners to offer ILM solutions that solve key challenges facing customers, including cost of storage, scalability issues, interoperability, data replication and adherence to various regulations.

Customers benefit from interoperability testing and integration certification by partners through HP’s open application programming interfaces (APIs), which provide customers with predictable installation and ongoing operations. Key HP ILM partners using HP APIs include Princeton Softech, OpenText and ADIC.

Princeton Softech’s Optim™ Enterprise Data Management solution enables customers to apply business policies that govern enterprise application data from creation to disposal. Optim interoperates with HP StorageWorks XP, EVA and MSA disk arrays and is also integrated with HP StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System (RISS). The integration allows clients to deploy cost-effective, tiered storage strategies, support compliance initiatives, and gain optimal business value from their enterprise applications and databases.

Open Text’s email archiving solutions enable organizations to manage the rapid growth of corporate email, reduce storage costs and improve server performance. HP and Open Text have also integrated and tested enterprise content management solutions based on the HP StorageWorks XP family of disk arrays. In addition, HP and Open Text collaborate in the fast-growing SAP data archiving market, where the companies plan to self-qualify additional ILM products that will quickly help meet customer needs.

Advanced Digital Information Corp.’s (ADIC) StorNext® data management software integrates with the HP Media Storage solution to provide media companies a highly effective system for producing, accessing, storing and broadcasting digital content. The HP and ADIC solution allows customers to save time and improve the efficiency of their business processes through high-performance file sharing across multiple operating systems and automated migration of digital assets between a variety of storage platforms, including the HP EVA disk arrays and EML tape libraries.

In related news, HP today announced that Starz Entertainment Group has deployed an HP Media Storage solution from HP and ADIC.

More information on the HP ILM Partner Program is available at http://www.hp.com/go/ILMDSPP. More information on HP’s overall ILM offering is available at http://www.hp.com/go/ilm.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company’s offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended Oct. 31, 2005, HP revenue totaled $86.7 billion. More information about HP (NYSE, Nasdaq: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.

Optim is a U.S. registered trademarks of Princeton Softech ADIC and StorNext are U.S. registered trademarks of Advanced Digital Information Corporation

This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they ever materialize or prove incorrect, could cause the results of HP and its consolidated subsidiaries to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including the expected development, performance or rankings of products or services; statements of expectation or belief; and any statement of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the development, performance and market acceptance of products and services and other risks that are described from time to time in HP’s Securities and Exchange Commission reports, including but not limited to HP’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended July 31, 2005, and other reports filed after HP’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended Oct. 31, 2004. HP assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.

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