The much-talked about HP Analyst Summit 2011 kicked off yesterday by CEO Leo Apotheker, where he revealed his strategic plans for the company’s growth for the very first time, in public.  As expected, Apotheker laid out the strategic plans for the technology giant including cloud, big data, and consumerization of the enterprise. The focus will be on three main areas including Cloud, Software and Connectivity. Although covered extensively by John Furrier yesterday, let’s do a quick roundup and delve into this morning’s afterglow.

Cloud
The prime focus here is not the public cloud but hybrid cloud. Yes, it intends to integrate services throughout the stack, just like EMC. Apotheker also revealed his plans to build an open applications marketplace to integrate consumer, enterprise and developer services. What analysts believe that as HP is a late-comer to the cloud game, it needs to pay attention to win it.

Connectivity
Well, HP is already a leader in this area with a huge installed base. As it already maintains a good position here, we believe it will pump out good in connectivity.

Software
Talking about software, we have already heard Apotheker focusing on this area. The company is going after software market ever since he took the charge. In an effort to do the same, it also acquired Vertica. Take a look at John’s comments on Vertica’s buyout.

Besides the strategy layout, HP also announced its plans to raise dividend for the first time in the last decade. We believe that this hike is an attempt to get love from Wall Street.

“The dividend has been 8 cents per share since 1998. It will rise to 12 cents per share the next time the board of directors declares a dividend, which should be in May. HP plans on increasing the dividend by a double-digit percentage every year”, said HP’s chief financial officer

Leo also reported that they will soon be selling the cloud computing services to the public. That means HP will be soon in competition with Amazon.com and other companies selling similar services. Whole world knows that Hewlett-Packard is the biggest manufacturer of Personal computers and hardware along with mobile phones & technology services. Now, it has decided to position itself as an intermediary to link those services by expanding its portfolio.