INDUSTRY

PALO ALTO, CA -- HP (NYSE: HPQ) and NEC Corporation (Nasdaq: NIPNY) today announced a strategic collaboration to deliver large-scale, open mission-critical solutions for targeted global industries. Through combined strengths in complex systems integration and consulting, innovative solutions, technology and breakthrough support capabilities, HP and NEC intend for customers to benefit from increased agility and reliability, with reduced time to deployment, cost and risk. Open mission-critical solutions aim to provide 24x365 reliability while offering speed, flexibility and cost-effectiveness that exceeds what the traditional mainframe environment can deliver. HP and NEC have already jointly delivered several complex mission-critical solutions in the financial and telecommunications industries and plan to further enhance their capabilities and strengths. Building on their success in Japan, HP and NEC intend to jointly pursue opportunities to market and deliver the solutions initially to a select number of targeted U.S. financial services and a range of global Japanese companies. HP and NEC also intend to explore broader market opportunities worldwide, common systems integration service menus and solution centers. The companies will leverage each other's enabling technologies, such as NEC's OpenDiosa and HP's Utility Data Center and Integrated Service Management (ISM). "Customers will benefit from the synergy of HP's IT infrastructure services and outsourcing capabilities combined with NEC's market-leading system integration and support technologies," said Ann Livermore, executive vice president, HP Services. "Through this collaboration today, HP and NEC target to be global leaders in the area of enterprise systems in the post-mainframe era by providing innovative open standard, mission-critical solutions," said Toshiro Kawamura, company deputy president, NEC Solutions. For more information visit www.nec.com or www.hp.com.