HP’s New Commercial PCs Solve Big IT Challenges

HP’s New Commercial PCs Solve Big IT Challenges

May 25, 2012

Released earlier this month, HP’s sleek new PCs for the enterprise are attractive, powerful and geared for Windows 8.

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REDMOND, Wash. — May 25, 2012 — In the ever-changing world of corporate IT, new challenges are always arising. From the “consumerization of IT” to managing a growing volume of data, today’s IT professionals must find a way to blend a huge array of new technologies while continually improving the efficiency and security of their organizations.

On May 9, one of the world’s top providers of enterprise technology, HP, released the largest new line of commercial products in its history, designed to address the issues facing IT both today and in the future. With more than 30 new business desktops, notebooks, workstations, printers and more, HP’s new lineup was created to help business leaders balance the onslaught of issues they’re facing today against the demands of their end users — while also offering a foundation for the future.

Featured HP PCs

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HP SpectreXT Pro

May 24, 2012

The HP SpectreXT Pro features an ultrastylish design with an all-metal chassis, slim bezel line and 13.3-inch display, measuring 14.5 mm thin and 3.07 pounds. This Windows PC is packed with feature-rich extras like Beats Audio™, backlit keyboard, HP CoolSense and TrueVision HD Webcam.

Download: Web

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Jeffery Hoag, an HP R&D professional who serves as a liaison between partners, customers and HP’s own engineering teams, says the new lineup is designed to offer the sleek, lightweight designs that users are craving while also providing the business and reliability features IT departments demand.

“It’s offering products that are manageable by IT rather than consumer products that are entering into the workplace,” he says. “With this new product refresh, we’re making enterprise computers light and sleek and cool enough that users will adopt them, while ensuring they support all the local and remote security features and software that HP deploys across our enterprise and business products.”

The new lineup includes a set of Ultrabooks designed to balance business features and attractive design. The company also announced its smallest and lightest EliteBook business notebook yet, the 2170p, scheduled to come out later this year. HP is also refreshing its b-series and s-series notebooks, designed for small and medium-sized businesses, with stylish aluminum cases. On the desktop side, the company has redesigned its 8300, 6300 and 4300 series desktops, including the introduction of a new 4300 series all-in-one PC.

According to Hoag, besides offering that important blend of enterprise and consumer appeal, all the new products were designed and built with the future in mind. As the industry prepares for the new world of Windows 8, HP has worked closely with Microsoft to understand the upcoming OS and build its PCs accordingly.

HP’s work with Microsoft involves a close collaboration including a resident engineer at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond. But according to Jeff Erbstein, senior director of Microsoft’s Worldwide HP account team responsible for commercial products, HP spends an even greater amount of time grounding its design work in customer feedback.

“They do multiple customer councils,” he says. “Their product design people spend a lot of time with customers reviewing current products and concepts to make sure they contain features and benefits that enterprise customers are really looking for.”

According to Hoag, HP routinely brings in IT managers and key decision-makers from its enterprise customers to both critique and to look at needs and functions both short term and long term. Many of the customers HP consults are worldwide organizations, with all the associated challenges of deploying across the globe to tens of thousands of users, something that HP takes seriously.

Whether it’s with its largest enterprise customers or industry partners such as Microsoft, Hoag says HP’s collaborative approach to product design has resulted in a massive suite of new products that are state-of-the-art now, and ready to handle the next generation of technologies.

“We’re looking to move ahead of the legacy and move into the future,” he says. “This new product refresh is not only a huge launch for us, it’s also a huge leap forward.”

Apple’s Tax Strategy Aims at Low-Tax States and Nations

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Sunday, April 29, 2012

Apple’s Tax Strategy Aims at Low-Tax States and Nations 

By CHARLES DUHIGG and DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

RENO, Nev. — Apple, the world’s most profitable technology company, doesn’t design iPhones here. It doesn’t run AppleCare customer service from this city. And it doesn’t manufacture MacBooks or iPads anywhere nearby.

Yet, with a handful of employees in a small office here in Reno, Apple has done something central to its corporate strategy: it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in California and 20 other states.

Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains.

California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero.

Setting up an office in Reno is just one of many legal methods Apple uses to reduce its worldwide tax bill by billions of dollars each year. As it has in Nevada, Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands — some little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office — that help cut the taxes it pays around the world.

Almost every major corporation tries to minimize its taxes, of course. For Apple, the savings are especially alluring because the company’s profits are so high. Wall Street analysts predict Apple could earn up to $45.6 billion in its current fiscal year — which would be a record for any American business.

Apple serves as a window on how technology giants have taken advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill suited to today’s digital economy. Some profits at companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft derive not from physical goods but from royalties on intellectual property, like the patents on software that makes devices work. Other times, the products themselves are digital, like downloaded songs. It is much easier for businesses with royalties and digital products to move profits to low-tax countries than it is, say, for grocery stores or automakers. A downloaded application, unlike a car, can be sold from anywhere.

The growing digital economy presents a conundrum for lawmakers overseeing corporate taxation: although technology is now one of the nation’s largest and most valued industries, many tech companies are among the least taxed, according to government and corporate data. Over the last two years, the 71 technology companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index — including Apple, Google, Yahoo and Dell — reported paying worldwide cash taxes at a rate that, on average, was a third less than other S.& P. companies’. (Cash taxes may include payments for multiple years.)

Even among tech companies, Apple’s rates are low. And while the company has remade industries, ignited economic growth and delighted customers, it has also devised corporate strategies that take advantage of gaps in the tax code, according to former executives who helped create those strategies.

Apple, for instance, was among the first tech companies to designate overseas salespeople in high-tax countries in a manner that allowed them to sell on behalf of low-tax subsidiaries on other continents, sidestepping income taxes, according to former executives. Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” which reduces taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands and then to the Caribbean. Today, that tactic is used by hundreds of other corporations — some of which directly imitated Apple’s methods, say accountants at those companies.

Without such tactics, Apple’s federal tax bill in the United States most likely would have been $2.4 billion higher last year, according to a recent study by a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan. As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent. (Apple does not disclose what portion of those payments was in the United States, or what portion is assigned to previous or future years.)

By comparison, Wal-Mart last year paid worldwide cash taxes of $5.9 billion on its booked profits of $24.4 billion, a tax rate of 24 percent, which is about average for non-tech companies.