Medrano has been handed the mandate of trying to focus HP's considerable investments in research and development on commercially viable products.
Executives believe many opportunities have been squandered in the past.
One of my tasks is to identify those technologies and bring them to market. Medrano was hand-picked for the job based on his reputation for understanding the security arena and knowing how to take a product to market. He immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico in 1975, with a pair of jeans, a guitar and no knowledge of the English language, but managed to work his way through to an MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Analysts said Medrano has his work cut out for him in trying to shake the bureaucratic cobwebs out of HP's divisions. They've done a great marketing job over the past two years but have no products to back it up.