The SiliconANGLE and Wikibon teams are in town this week to go deep and cover HP’s new public unveiling of their strategy. Not only will we cover the news but we’ll go deep. So stay tuned here on SiliconANGLE.com and Wikibon.org for the complete coverage.

HP’s last  decade has been marked by two high profile CEO’s.    A visionary saleswoman who correctly wanted to buy PWC but lost out to a board fight and politics. Ultimately IBM proved her right.  And a cost cutting executionist. Who reduced overheads, slashed waste and cut R&D to the bone.   The new CEO Leo Apotheker is putting forth the combination of the visionary- who can increase HP’s R&D effectiveness and increase the depth of its software portfolio.  He wants to be known as the practical CEO who can focus on profitable businesses and jettison the losers.   Today in San Fransisco, HP and Apotheker laid out the strategic plan which includes everything that we’ve been covering here at SiliconANGLE for the past year – cloud, big data, and consumerization of the enterprise.

In addition, HP announced a new dividend goal that authorized a 50 percent increase in the amount of its regular quarterly dividend to $0.12 per share.   The increase in the amount of the dividend will be effective when the HP board of directors declares HP’s next dividend, which is expected to occur in May. The company’s previously announced dividend payable on April 6 for stockholders of record on March 16 will not be increased and will remain at $0.08 per share.

According to HP their strategy will cut across three strategic areas:

Cloud: Rollout turn key “cloud stack” and offer hybrid cloud.  No mention of public cloud.  HP is actually stacked with cloud tech but have not done a good job in getting the word out.   This is similar to EMC when I asked ex-Intel exec now president of EMC Pat Gelsinger what cloud means for customers. Like EMC HP intends to integrate services throughout the stack. Note: SiliconANGLE will be on hand for the deep dive analyst event.

CEO Leo Apotheker today unveiled the company’s plans to build an open applications marketplace that integrates consumer, enterprise and developer services. HP is hoping to become the “Apple App Store” for the enterprise which is a message which resonates with CIOs and IT professionals. The consumerization of IT is a trend that was once elusive but now clear with the explosive growth of Apple and Android not so much WebOs but maybe HP won’t be late to the game. Personally, I think that they are late to the game but that is pure opinion. I’ll be watching this develop and unfold. As a side note to the WebOs debate, Microsoft finally killed Zune. HP should pay attention to the fact that they need to play to win with the WebOS or marketplace clone strategy.

Connectivity: HP is pushing the leadership message with connectivity. HP has a great position in this market and their installed base is huge. I think that this is an area that HP should be pumping up big. They have the triple threat in connectivity: they have differentiation and advantage in 1) scale, 2) technology, and 2) cost structure. Additionally, the cloud business seems to be under the leadership of ESSN division head Dave Donatelli should produce some interesting moves this year. Most of those execs have already become SilicionANGLE.tv theCube alumni – Dave Donatelli, Marius Hauss, Jim Gantier, Mike Banic, among others. The Donatelli Robison partnership should be a good one since Dave does a good job of working with technical execs. I’m expecting big things from the converged team.

Software: HP is betting the ranch on big data in that the entire business process will be online. I think the top minds in the industry would all agree (as we do) that this is a great and relevant direction for HP. As many know SiliconANGLE was the first blog to cover big data before it was sexy.

Recently at the “home of big data” the Cloudera office – I interviewed the ex-HP CTO for information infrastructure now the EVP at Data Direct Networks Jean-Luc Chatelain. {video link here}

Upon completion, HP’s acquisition of Vertica will provide an important asset in this area. Here are my comments via video on HP’s buyout of Vertica
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As I reported last month on HP’s big moves, HP’s new CEO Leo Apotheker wants information to be at the center of their entire product strategy – that’s software…expect to see more and more investments from HP in data and software with an initiative for an appliance. This is clearly the direction for what I’m calling Information Infrastructure – something completely different than data warehouse. Examples in the market today worth noting is a company called Clickfox – a successful growing startup that is using information infrastructure (data) to provide a business decision engine for companies like Sprint.

It’s clear that HP’s new CEO wanted to establish a software strategy that was grounded in “data analytics”.

Stay tuned for more reports from the SiliconANGLE team from the HP event in San Francisco.

In the meantime, In the meantime, check out this blog post from Software Advice that is speculating who HP will buy next.

Here is the new CEO at HP

HP CEO Leo Apotheker Keynote – HP Summit 2011