After three days of interviewing top executives and thought leaders of HP in Barcelona, John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, sat down to discuss the impressions post HP Discover 2013.

They analyzed both the show and the marketplace and these are their editorial commentaries:

“Everytime you are analyzing HP as a whole is like talking about the Government,” joked Vellante. “There are a lot of organizations each with their individual agenda. Meg Whitman’s challenge is of course to stich all those together, creating a vision about a new style of IT, that lives along traditional divisions that are driving revenue and profitability, who largely have distinct strategies. I think that’s what HP Discover is all about: it’s a big show, intended as a big customer event for HP.” speculated Vellante. “The show itself underscores just how many fragmented pieces of HP there actually are, highlighting how big this organization it is and how complicated things are within.”

Regardless of the possible inner turmoil of the company, Furrier noted that the show itself has a great vibe.”You can see the entire layout of HP, the holistic picture of what this organization is about. It is a monster,” Furrier said, highlighting the many different areas of expertise, laid all out, available for the customers to come and weave around.

“You can feel the optimism; there’s really no cloud around HP,” stated Furrier. “Despite me having a couple of personal commentaries on some of the management approaches that may be a bit different than what I think they should be doing, a lot of things are going in the right direction.”

The market place

“Competitively, the Market place is pretty dynamic: you have cloud, mobile and Social Big Data, security, converged infrastructure and storage. The Big Data is taking center stage, followed closely by the cloud. These are two of the main anchor concepts here: Cloud, with hybrid cloud, and Big Data with Vertica and Autonomy,” noted Furrier, who turned to Vellante to hear his take on the market.

“The market is huge, we’re talking trillions of dollars in revenue each year. When HP made the decision to go out and acquire Compaq and EDS, they decided to play in all markets: hardware, software and services. HP is deeply embedded in every market segment. What’s I’ve always said over the past couple of years is that ‘HP has to shrink to grow’,” said Vellante. “Antonio Neri stated that HP is a 125 billion dollar company; the latest report shows it’s only 112 billion, so it’s shrinking before it can grow. It’s got some ways it can go here. As you said, there’s no cloud around HP. Well, there is one in terms of growth. Companies like IBM and HP are not growing. If they are not growing, their stocks are not doing what their shareholders want them to do,” pointed out Dave Vellante.

Trends

Moving on to the trends, John Furrier listed:

• Hyperscale
• Mobility
• Security
• Big Data
• Cloud
• Social

and then invited Dave to break those down.

“Let’s talk about cloud. Back in 2010, HP had a good story around private cloud. Our commentary back then was the gap between cloud service providers and Infrastructure as a Service providers like Amazon,” recalled Vellante.

“To close that gap, we anticipated there was going to be a lot of work involved. That gap has somewhat closed, companies like Amazon are driving revenue and growth, but we’re talking about a significant company that’s growing 50-60 percent a year. That is a big challenge, but if they keep growing, their stock profit goes up. Companies like IBM and HP they throw in a lot of cash, they miss by a penny and their stock drops,” summarized Vellante. “Cloud is a great growth opportunity for HP. After the arrival of Saar Gillai, I am now convinced that HP has a cloud offering; I wasn’t certain until mid this year,” confessed Vellante.

John Furrier recalled Meg Whitman’s statement: “We want to focus on the business that we want to be in.”

“They are certainly betting on cloud,” said Vellante. “On the cloud side, I think they are in the game,” agreed Furrier as well. “Before Saar, you had no idea who ran cloud. There were silos everywhere, competing sales, it was a disaster,” criticized Furrier. “It was confusing and hard to understand. Saar was the vector of change. He brought in an execution focus.” Another big opportunity for HP in Furrier’s opinion is OpenStack. “I think HP can be the modern leader in moving the ball down the field with cloud. They have to continue to execute,” warned Furrier, stating what he thought the biggest risk HP faces right now. “Execution and focus for the cloud is paramount.”

The HP strategy as Vellante recounts from one of the interviews is “Hybrid cloud with a customer choice”.

Dave Vellante continued his paralles citing Jerry Chen: “Like Jerry Chen said on theCUBE at AWS re:invent, ‘OpenStack is trying to be all things for all people, while Amazon is just trying to be one thing for all people’. HP is also trying to be all things to all people, and it’s going to be hard, but it gives them a bigger market opportunity,” stated Vellante.

Business model

Furrier mentioned Meg Whitman’s quote from her keynote: “HP makes it, backes it up and services it”. “Meg highlighted Moonshot and storage as a real trend for HP and I think she’s doing a good job consolidating and mobilizing the existing teams. It’s clear she’s pulling in the right direction,” said Furrier, while Vellante played the analyst card and demanded a sit and wait period.

“The server business is still big, still market leading – as we heard from Jim Ganthier – the storage business, the 3PAR acquisition, is the gift that keeps on giving, and networking – with Bethany Mayer in charge – seems to have a market impact,” noted Vellante.

Furrier gave Whitman proper praise for being an enabler, for instilling cohesiveness, teamwork and performance.

Some of key things in Furrier’s opinion are the careful management of personnel and execution: keeping the ball moving. To Vellante, it’s more about “getting their portfolio right.”

The products

“My issue is growth,” began Vellante. “I’m not going to talk about the hardware infrastructure piece. I think their focus should be on Big Data. HP Vertica is a crown jewel. Vertica, Haven and autonomy can actually participate in that big data business. They key to that is developers. HP has to appeal to developers in order to seize that opportunity.”

Furrier’s impression is that HP wants to be software-led, because this is the future. “Software drives everything. Dorm room to boardroom, HP can be successful with the right software architecture. And they cannot do that without developers,” warned Furrier.

Reverting to Whitman’s declarations, she said “Desktop is not dead”, and in theCUBE co-hosts opinion, that’s not what her message should have been. HP should stress out that “we have an unprecedented advantage with supply chain; we can be in any business we want.”