Agilent Technologies is a measurement and instrument company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Agilent's roots are at the founding of Hewlett-Packard in 1939. When all of the businesses not related to computers, storage, and imaging were spun off from HP in 1999 to form Agilent, it became the largest initial public offering in the history of Silicon Valley. The spin-off created an $8 billion company with about 47,000 employees, manufacturing scientific instruments, semiconductors, optical networking devices, and electronic test equipment for telecom and wireless R&D and production. Agilent accomplishes this in two corporate segments: Electronic Measurement and Bio-Analytical Measurement. Electronic Measurement Business segment provides standard and customized electronic measurement instruments and systems; monitoring, management, and optimization tools for communications networks and services; and software design tools, and related services that are used in the design, development, manufacture, installation, deployment, and operation of electronics equipment and communications networks and services. This segment markets its products and services to handset manufacturers, network equipment manufacturers, and communications service providers. Agilent's bio-analytical measurement business focuses on the life sciences industry and in the environmental, chemical, food and petrochemical industries and in materials sciences, where it provides application-focused solutions that include instruments, software, consumables, and services that enable customers to identify, quantify, and analyze the physical and biological properties of substances and products. Its products in bio-analytical products are divided into 12 key product categories: gas chromatography, liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry, microfluidics, microarrays, atomic force microscopy, PCR instrumentation, software and informatics, and related bioreagents, consumables and services. The company sells its products and services primarily through direct sales, distributors, resellers, manufacturer's representatives, telesales, and electronic commerce. Agilent Technologies was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.

Agilent Technologies has been hailed by analysts as having a good "diversified" product line in communications and the life sceinces industry, and a minimal exposure to the credit crunch that has affected many other businesses. It is definetely a good candidate for a "defensive" investment. Even as sales have declined, Agilent has managed to increase its net income dramatically over the past two years. The company's bio-analytic sector is experiencing double-digit growth. And what's more, Agilent is an industry leader in nanotechnology on its instruments, which will become much more widely-used in the healthcare diagnosis field in the near future. Agilent's revenues have been growing at a healthy rate (up 9% in 2007 over the last year), and is engaged in a $2 billion share buyback on top of the $6 billion worth of stock it has repurchased since 2005.