

Hewlett-Packard is trying to reposition itself as more than just a hardware company, and it seems that while doing so, the company has adopted itself an agenda for just about every trend in IT – from the cloud to mobile to big data. This was expressed pretty well during day one of the HP Discover conference, which kicked off yesterday.
An audience of 10,000 people attended CEO Leo Apotheker’s keynote, which came after an introduction video that got some pretty high marks from reviewers. Apotheker started by discussing connectivity, and expanded the discussion into the “Everything as a Service” mantra HP is following (not entirely unlike Apple’s new concept on consumer services). He revealed that the company is in the process of building a full cloud stack that includes IaaS and PaaS offerings, an Open Cloud Marketplace and a public cloud offering reportedly set to launch “soon.”
Apotheker then moved on to talk webOS. The third and latest version of the mobile platform was in the highlight all throughout the conference, especially when the chief executive said the long-awaited TouchPad tablet will be released “very quickly.” He then noted that the TouchPad is first and foremost an enterprise-purposed device, compared to the well-equipped iPad, for example.
WebOS will also make it to PCs and printers, and at this point Apotheker started discussing the customer data explosion and analytics in the cloud. He highlighted his company’s focus on structured and particularly unstructured data analytics, and elaborated on HP’s strategy. According to the chief executive, his company will start offering products around big data analytics in a Software-as-a-Service model sometime in or after the second fiscal quarter, shortly after the acquisition of Vertica Systems will be finalized.
Lastly, the final topic Apotheker addressed is security, and that HP is actually the fourth largest vendor in this industry. After a major cloud hack for Amazon and the PlayStation network, cloud security is an important topic for vendors such as HP, and maintaining a leading position in this market will help HP grow its distribution channels around the cloud-services it intends to grow.
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