Hardware giant Hewlett-Packard will hold its earnings call three days from now on August 18, two days after competitor Dell.  Under relatively new chief executive Leo Apotheker the company has been expanding greatly in the high-margin services and cloud segments, and investors will need to be convinced that has been paying off.

Wall Street expects HP to report earnings of 1.09 a share, on revenue of $31.2 billion. The latter figure represents a 2.3 percent decline compared to the same period last year. This means the company will have to do some clarification about its recent 20 percent price slash on the TouchPad now set $399, as well shed some light on how its other cloud computing and software ventures are performing.

Investors may not be confident about HP’s latest ventures, but the consensus is that the components have benefited the company, and the whole industry for that matter.

“Analysts widely expect HP to benefit from falling commodity prices,” reports ZDNet.  “For a company with HP’s scale, cheaper component pricing can fall right to the bottom line.

However, HP will have to address its investment into its services business and give some color on its WebOS plans. HP CEO Leo Apotheker will also have to put on a good performance on the conference call.”

Hewlett-Packard as well as other PC makers are seeing lowering demand from consumers, but that may not be a bad thing on the short-term.  Both HP and Dell earn much higher margins from selling enterprise hardware, an area that seems to be on the rise. This presumption was triggered by Cisco’s recent earnings call that helped boost tech stock across several indexes.

Cisco has seen increased blade server and switching sales this quarter, markets that HP is also targeting. This facilitates some room for a somewhat optimistic forecast, though the company will also be seeing increased competition on the longer run.