The annual HP Discover conference held June 4-7 in Las Vegas has concluded. This year’s event attracted around 10,000 attendees and had a broad focus including technology convergence, information optimization, security and risk management, application transformation, mobility and services. However, the real purpose of HP Discover was convincing anyone that would listen (including the invited investment community) that Hewlett-Packard (HP) has a strong future ahead.

HP had an even larger than typical presence at Discover 2012. The event’s tagline “make it better” was an effort to communicate that HP is all about solutions. Meg Whitman reinforced this message in her keynote saying that HP was not reinventing itself. Instead, the company is focusing even more on what it already does well – infrastructure and services. Dave Donatelli was less than shy about positioning HP as a leader. He said HP needs to get its message out and counter “perceptions” that the company is faltering. HP’s leadership repeatedly reassured attendees that dismal financial performance for the past few quarters, numerous management upheavals and cutting tens of thousands of jobs is just the company beginning its four-to-five year turn around that will position HP for an uber successful future.

Storage, cloud and big data appear to be what HP believes will pave its path back to market dominance. In the storage sector, HP as lost market share to EMC and NetApp in recent years, but Donatelli believes that the slide is ending saying HP will be able to innovate faster than competitors will. A range of new hardware, software and services offerings accompanied Donatelli’s confidence.  The company’s new StoreOnce systems are said to backup data three times faster than EMC’s new DD990 with Boost launched only two weeks ago.

Although hardware makes up 70 percent of HP’s revenue, the company made it clear its future is also tied with the cloud. The company made several additions to its two-month-old Converged Cloud product family. As with storage, HP asserts that it is best vendor to support increasing enterprise demands for hybrid cloud solutions. Terrence Ngai, Director, Worldwide Enterprise Cloud Solutions said,

“What we don’t want to do is sell you a cloud silo. Customers are worried about vendor lock-in,”

something Donatelli and Ngai say HP is vehemently against and demonstrates by embracing open standards and offering numerous interoperability options that allows customers to use some HP solutions without forcing them to universally adopt HP. HP demonstrated its openness by announcing that CloudSystem will now offer customers the ability to move workloads to other providers as well, through Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) or HP’s own hosted pay-as-you-go services, which are built on OpenStack.

On the big data front, although the company could not hold onto Autonomy’s Mike Lynch, it is deeply embracing the company’s Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL). It used Discover 2012 to showcase its support for Apache Hadoop, and even claimed it could out-perform many of its key rivals, most notably Oracle. The company added that its big data service is almost four times faster than Oracle’s big data appliance.

Attendees, financial analysts and especially partners seem to be buying what HP is selling. The stock price is up, and the company’s new offerings are receiving positive feedback from almost everyone. Whitman’s leadership is working well for the company in spite of what will clearly be a bumpy year ahead.