We’ve seen a fair share of updates and news coming from Hewlett-Packard’s direction in the last 36 hours, starting with their market strength. According to IDC’s numbers for Q4 2010, HP overthrown NetApp as the 3 largest player in the worldwide external disk storage systems market. HP’s market share was 11.6 percent with $704 million in revenues, which is behind IBM with a $996 million in revenues and a 16.3% share, and EMC (first place) with a 26 percent share of the market and a whopping $1.582 billion in revenues.

Hopping down to the consumer electronics space, HP’s got a new business PC. The all new HP Omni Pro 110 is the first business-oriented addition to its all-in-one PC line-up, and features a 1,600p by 900p 20-inch anti-glare screen and an Intel Pentium or Intel Core 2 Duo processor. The Omni Pro 110 also comes with up to 4GB of RAM, hard drives going up to 1TB and a whole bunch of integrated accessories, which will set you back at least $639.

Hewlett-Packard has a currently undisputed hold of the hardware market, but some analysts believe it should take another business approach to compensate for the 2 percent revenues loss reported for the last quested. A recent WSJ article noted HP should strengthen its hold of the relatively high margin IT consulting services market by enhancing its software offerings and Cowen analyst Peter Goldmacher seem to think something along the same lines.

Goldmacher proposes Hewlett-Packard should jump on the commodity software bandwagon by building on in-house and open source software – why? Because it has nothing to lose. The lack of an HP foothold in the market means it has no revenue stream or market share to protect, and it already has a massive sales channel fully capable of backing the company’s efforts.

According to Goldmacher, HP could leave mission critical workloads to Oracle and slowly erode Larry Ellison’s “opportunity to sell eight figure enterprise wide contracts” over time. Of course, HP’s move into open source would likely nuke a partnership with Microsoft, but that’s a small price to pay, says Goldmacher.

It may be a good idea for HP to start looking at the less-competitive software market, because competition on the hardware front does come with a price. This includes the company’s weak presence in the tablet space, not to mention its Q4 losses.