  At high center of mass energies, hadroproduction of heavy quarks can be
expressed in terms of the same color dipole cross section as low Bjorken-x deep
inelastic scattering. We show analytically that at leading order, the dipole
formulation is equivalent to the gluon-gluon fusion mechanism of the
conventional parton model. In phenomenological application, we employ a
parameterization of the dipole cross section which also includes higher order
and saturation effects, thereby going beyond the parton model. Numerical
calculations in the dipole approach agree well with experimental data on open
charm production over a wide range of energy. Dipole approach and next to
leading order parton model yield similar values for open charm production, but
for open bottom production, the dipole approach tends to predict somewhat
higher cross sections than the parton model.
