Although the company was reluctant to divulge financial details, according to Hewlett-Packard vice-president (enterprise accounts organisation) Stacy Plemmons, "Despite the recession in India and around the world, HP has done well and we expect good results this year."

Although software companies in India have reported exceptionally good results, things have been tougher for hardware companies. However, since HP's hardware sales have been linked to ERP sales, the companies has weathered the downturn better. Also, the wide range of peripherals that HP has developed have ensured a certain loyalty from clients. HP India is fully owned by Hewlett PackardCompany, US.

However, the south-east Asian crisis has affected HP's business there. Says HP India's Subroto Das, "People are delaying orders and projects are slowing down."

Hewlett-Packard has unveiled the roadmap for the future of its high performance 64-bit precision architecture-reduced instruction set computing (PA-RISC) processors. "Our enterprise customers will see significant improvement in performance in PA-RISC family," Stacy explains.

The PA-8500 processor, at a speed of 440 mhz, will be launched before the year-end while PA-8600 with a speed of 560 mhz, is slated for the year 2000.

Further, HP plans to launch its processors, the PA-8700 and 8800 by 2002 and PA-8900 little later. "These launches are part of HP's efforts to provide its customers with the massive resources for future computing requirements," Stacy Plemmons said.

Customers can continue to rely on binary compatibility across the PA-RISC family, enabling seamless inter-operability with legacy applications on HP systems. Thebinary compatibility protects customers' investments, enabling rapid growth and adoption of new technology infrastructures.

The new processors are capable of providing an ideal combination of performance and product benefits for data intensive applications for the Internet, data warehousing, transaction processing and computer aided designing. The processors offer competitive frequency levels and have consistently exceeded their performance expectations.