Though the event itself lacked the level of flare often witnessed at trade shows, Hewlett-Packard’s handful of potentially game-changing announcements at HP Discover 2014 in Las Vegas earlier this month were impressive enough to HP evangelists and supporters. In a final wrap session for the conference, theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante offer their perspectives on HP’s current course, debating predictions for its future.

Slow Progression

Furrier kicked off the session by noting HP’s worthy announcements, such as the new HP Apollo family and HP Helion OpenStack for the enterprise. He was impressed with HP’s revelations, but still thought that turnaround for these innovations were too slow. “Overall, I see the ship moving positively in the right direction away from the icebergs into the warmer waters,” Furrier added.

Vellante agreed with Furrier in the fact that HP has been moving too slowly. However, looking at it from a different angle, he believes that part of the reason for this was due to HP CEO Meg Whitman having to deal with the mess left behind from former CEO Leo Apotheker. Vellante mentioned HP’s various investments and PC division spin-off as examples of things that occurred when Apotheker was in charge that caused HP to go into a tailspin. He added Whitman is still tweaking things, which may be why the company takes so much time on its releases. “It’s somewhat frustrating, but the good news is the valuation of this company has risen quite dramatically in the last 12 months,” said Vellante.

The Missing Killer Component

When you think about Oracle, you think database and applications. IBM has its huge software portfolio. EMC has VMware. These companies all have a notable killer component. HP has Autonomy, Vertica, security, little acquisitions and a multi-billion dollar software business, but Vellante believes that all this isn’t enough. “They’re missing that killer component,” he said.

He advised that HP grow that business, but questioned whether or not the business can “grow fast enough and become a big enough contributor to power HP, to power the margins of this company.”

Vellante thinks that this is going to take some time. He did, however, mention that he’s seeing HP get back into the acquisition game. He’s also noticing the company bring on corporate development people who have the ability to really drive HP’s inorganic growth, complimenting its organic growth.

HP Predictions: Continued Turnaround, Aggressive M&A

So what do Furrier and Vellante see in HP’s future? Vellante believes that HP will continue its turnaround, successfully moving the ball forward. He also thinks HP’s stocks are going to continue to rise and that its valuation is going to double over the next 12 – 24 months. “I am more positive on HP than I have been in four or five years,” added Vellante.

Furrier believes that there’s going to be some aggressive mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity. Noticing that Whitman’s keynote had a different type of vibe than previous presentations, he thinks there’s going to be even more new products coming out of HP, but the company will manage such opportunities conservatively.

Furrier also predicts strategic deals in the pipeline, saying the Cloud team will start doing acquisitions, moving quickly on the product market fit to accelerate the open source community and gain more of a sales-growth mindset in this sector. In terms of software, he thinks there’s going to be a much more accelerated effort around product market fit for revenue, with aggressive sales.