Now comes the hard part. Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina proved wrong the critics who said she could never make the megamerger with Compaq work. Now the challenge is to prove that HP can provide useful products and services, other than printers, that can generate steady profits.

At the one-year anniversary of the merger last week, Fiorina laid out her vision for HP's future. "It's time for technology to yield to the disciplines of business," she said. Her plan, called the Adaptive Enterprise, involves combining hardware, software, and services into a utility service to provide computing resources cheaply and efficiently.

Key to the plan are HP's new Darwin Reference Architecture services and its existing Utility Data Center products. Darwin is primarily an evaluation service HP will use to prime customers for upcoming Adaptive Enterprise products. The Utility Data Center can manage any data-center device and also includes HP OpenView network and system-management software to dynamically reconfigure resources. With UDC, "you wire and cable once, and then make changes in the logical view, not the physical wiring," says Ann Livermore, executive VP for services.

New Balance Athletic Shoe Inc. is a candidate for Adaptive Enterprise. It has 16 ProLiant blade servers and plans to add another six later this month. New Balance uses HP ProLiant Essentials, HP Insight Manager, and HP OpenView software to manage the servers and says they're critical to the company's expanding IT needs. "Our server requirements have grown," says Pierre Baudet, business systems manager, "but the staff deploying and managing servers hasn't."