What is HP Living Progress?

When Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard first set out to build HP, they did so with a focus on “choosing the right things to do.” Bill once explained, “We operated on the assumption that if we made a contribution to society, rewards would follow.”

Today, HP continues to live that ethos with a vision we call HP Living Progress. HP Living Progress isn’t a campaign or a program. It’s simply the way we do business; the way our people and technology come together to solve society’s toughest challenges, creating a better future for everyone through our actions and innovations.

With a rapidly growing population, finite resources, economic instability and global health crises, the planet’s needs cannot be ignored. However, with every challenge comes an opportunity, and we believe these global challenges present openings for innovative companies like HP to create a stronger and more sustainable world.

Living Progress is our approach to simultaneously driving human, economic and environmental progress. This means we consider the human, economic and environmental impacts as we develop our products, manage our operations, and interact with our customers, employees and communities. Here are three examples:

Project Moonshot
Cloud computing already uses more energy than 191 of the world’s 196 countries, and we continue to face increased computing demands.

We created HP Moonshot to help reduce the carbon footprint of cloud computing. HP Moonshot servers use up to 89 percent less energy and require 80 percent less space than traditional server architecture, in addition to costing up to 77 percent less.¹  This solution not only drives environmental and economic progress; by providing greater access to cloud computing (and the business, health and educational benefits that come with it), we can also enable human progress.

Go West
Recognizing the negative impact that commuting to coastal factories was having on Chinese migrant workers, we created a new manufacturing center closer to their homes in central China. This strategy, which we call Go West, helps keep workers closer to their families, culture, dialect and cuisine. It also improves our operating margin, driving value back to our shareholders.

Just as importantly, we also created a train route to more efficiently ship our products from inland Chinese factories to markets in Europe. Go West helps drive environmental progress, as the new train network transports products at a fraction of the carbon impact of air freight and several days faster than air freight.

HP Earth Insights
We are partnering with Conservation International (CI) to track and analyze more than three Terabytes of critical biodiversity information from tropical forests. The collaboration, called HP Earth Insights, uses HP Vertica big data analytics to create early warnings for threatened species. In HP Earth Insights, we deploy the same technology that companies use to gain insights that drive business value. This technology helps inform proactive responses to environmental threats as they emerge, and can empower better decision making for the 1.6 billion people worldwide who rely on tropical forests for their livelihoods.

As we look to the future, we see great challenges and great opportunities. We’ll continue to apply our talents and technology to help solve Earth’s most complex challenges. Through HP Living Progress, we approach each new product, service, factory and supplier as an opportunity to create a better future for everyone.

I recently recorded the video about HP Living Progress.

¹Based on HP internal estimates of total cost to operate HP Moonshot with ProLiant Moonshot Server Cartridges as compared to traditional servers.