Personality Profile: Bernard Guidon: HP's Workstation Man

Career includes seven moves between France and U.S.

Biography:
            Name: Bernard Guidon
             Age: 48
  Place of Birth: Paris, France
   Car He Drives: Ford Taurus (company car)
Current Position: General Manager, Workstation Business Unit,
		  Hewlett-Packard Co.
Time in Current Position: 6 months
   Years in the Industry: 21

   Pet Open Systems Peeve: "I think there is a need for people to
readjust their perception. People may not realize how powerful
the unification is, that has happened in the last two years.
Eighty percent of what they ever needed in UNIX unification is
being done now and people may not have realized this is available
now. They still may have the impression of the way it was three
to five years ago. The unification of the applications and the
unification of the user interface-those things are very powerful."

   Management Philosophy: "I strongly believe in people. You tell
the people what you think is the right direction to go, you make
sure they have a chance to discuss and understand a specific
objective, and then you get out of the way and let the people
do it. That's one management idea. The second is to listen to
the customer and always be ready to reconsider what you believe
based on what they say. So I'm someone who spends a lot of time
listening."

   On UniForum: "UniForum is one of the few organizations that 
embody the philosophy and the spirit of open systems.  UniForum 
is really the mindset of open systems, and that's exactly what 
the customer wants to have.  It should promote the value of
open systems, which is basically the power of choice".

It's a good thing Bernard Guidon is fond of traveling. Six months ago, the 21-year Hewlett-Packard employee and native Frenchman was transferred from France to the United States for the fourth time, this time to head up HP's Workstation Business Unit in Chelmsford, MA. Although it was a promotion Guidon was happy to take, he had to leave his family behind in France so that his two teenage children could finish their schooling there over the next two years.

Although he misses his family, Guidon is excited about the opportunity he has. "I love the job because HP has a very strong position in UNIX," he says. "The workstation marketplace is a very fast-moving kind of marketplace, for which HP has a tremendous opportunity. The most challenging thing is to move not only on the workstation, but to really cover the overall space of technical computing and bring overall technical computing into the client/server arena. The workstation marketplace is about a $10 billion market for all companies, but technical computing is a $75 billion market."

HP's main thrusts in workstation products now are coming in two areas-technology and distribution. Guidon wants to produce leading-edge technology, especially in the visualization and computational aspects, across a broad product line. "For example, for our RISC-based workstation, we have very significant investment going into graphics and visualization," he says. "Because we have such large revenues associated with our UNIX and workstation program, we can have some very large investment going on from an R&D perspective." On the distribution side, HP is focusing on very large accounts. "The very large accounts like to do business with HP," he says.

Another boon for HP, Guidon believes, will be the company's agreement with Intel for advanced microprocessor development, aiming at products to become available around the turn of the millennium. Then the company will be able to provide workstations that handle not only technical computing, but also Intel-based software such as that now running on DOS and Windows. That will eliminate the need for technical workers to have separate PCs to run such applications as word processing and spreadsheets.

Fascinated with Technology

A native of Paris, Guidon was educated at the University of Toulouse, one of the leading French universities for electronics. His first objective was a general focus on electronics, but he found himself spending more and more time with computers as he progressed in his studies. "I think computers are fascinating in terms of the power of the tool, and what they can provide for human beings and business," he says. "At that time, I did not understand the business impact of computers, but I clearly understood some of the power they could have in terms of the tasks they could do."

Guidon developed a fascination with the United States, one he believes other European technologists share. He decided to move in 1973 and took a position in the Boston area as a software designer doing research and development with Hewlett-Packard. "The U.S. was leading everything-the new ideas in both technology and society in general, and I definitely wanted to be moving into more leading-edge things that way," he says.

At the same time, he was never sure exactly where his career would take him. "I wanted to be in on the design of computer systems. But over time, who could say where that was going to lead me? I had always had a very pragmatic mode of operating-kind of doing one step and only then deciding what to do next."

Over the course of his career, Guidon gained experience in many areas of the computer business. His first job with HP was working on the design of a real-time driver, an integral part of HP's real-time executive for the HP 1000 computer.

The company moved him to San Diego in 1974, where he worked as an engineer on some broad technical issues connected with a card reader. Between 1974 and 1975 he helped move all the product's technical knowledge from San Diego to HP's operation in Grenoble, France. "I was very much involved in all aspects-hardware, mechanical, software, production-everything. It was a very comprehensive and very broad kind of experience," Guidon says. He had to move back to France on that project, where for less than a year he worked in Grenoble. Then he was transferred to Boise, ID, where he became the U.S. marketing manager for peripherals. "I started to get involved much more in marketing activities at that time," he recalls. "At the end of two years in Boise, I had gained an engineering understanding, a production understanding, and a marketing understanding, and I'd had the opportunity to work both in the United States and in Europe. So that started to give me a broad set of knowledge, and I really like having that broad knowledge to be able to handle a multifunction type of job. I think HP has continued to push me into that direction as well."

Good-bye to Boise

After two years in Boise, Guidon was send back to Grenoble, where he was an R&D engineering section manager, designing computer-related data entry devices for HP. While in Grenoble, he also moved into marketing again and became more involved with UNIX, as marketing manager for those UNIX-related data entry devices. "I was able to go from engineering to marketing-back and forth," he says. Some time later HP decided to make Grenoble the European center for its computer networking activities, and Guidon became marketing manager for the networking operation HP created in Europe. After two years on that job, the company asked him to take the job of worldwide marketing manager for HP networking, based in Cupertino, CA. So in 1985, Guidon made his third move to the United States with his family.

By that time the UNIX business was starting to become significant for HP, and Guidon had to put together a networking strategy, much of which was related to UNIX. After a few years, he became business manager for HP's commercial UNIX operation, which was less than $100 million a year at the time. It was during that time that Guidon began to visualize the great commercial potential of UNIX. "That's when I started to realize that UNIX was more than likely going to become the number one commercial operating system in the world," he says. Guidon was given the task of helping to create and write a business plan for a new organization for UNIX called the General System Organization, under which HP has built its commercial UNIX-related business to between $2.5 and $3 billion a year.

After a total of seven years in California, Guidon made a personal decision. "I wanted to take my family back to Europe, especially for my kids' education, and send them to a French type of secondary school," he says. So, in 1992, he moved his family back to France, where Guidon managed some of HP's European computer marketing activities. It was a move his family appreciated, but HP had further plans for Guidon. In mid-1994 he was named to his current position and had to move across the Atlantic for a seventh time. This time, his family stayed in France so that his 16-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter could complete their schooling.

The Future

Guidon is optimistic about the industry's ability to unify around open systems. "If you had asked me five years ago if I thought we could unify UNIX, I would have said 'I'm not quite sure this will ever happen,' and it did," he says. The unification of UNIX has been slow in coming, but has come a long way recently, Guidon believes. "The last two years have been extremely great. It has really accelerated and is now providing all the basics of unification, whether it's from an API perspective with Spec 1170 or from the user interface level with the Common Desktop Environment. Everything has really come together and crystallized over the past couple of years in a very significant way."

What needs to happen now is for UNIX vendors to unify at the desktop level, Guidon believes. "The desktop has a Microsoft flavor, which is not open," he says. "What we need is either to get Microsoft to be open or to get an open desktop type of thing coming together, so that everything from the desktop to the data center-across everything-can finally be based on an open systems philosophy. I am optimistic. Somehow, I think the customer always wins, and I believe this is what makes sense for customers. So one way or the other, someday it's going to happen. The issues are how and when."