Hewlett-Packard chairman and venture capitalist Ray Lane sat down for an interview with Reuters, and discussed how chief executive Leo Apotheker’s push into the cloud may be just what’s needed to “return the former Silicon Valley icon to stability.”

Lane said that Apotheker’s first and foremost foremost duty is to tackle the excessive cost cutting of the former HP CEO, Mark Hurd, who both left the company facing allegations of inappropriate conduct.

“It’s not a three-month job,” Lane said, adding that Apotheker is focused on HP’s long-term growth.

“Mark Hurd did not invest,” said Lane, who is also a former top executive at Oracle Corp. “He burned the furniture to please Wall Street,” he said.”

One of the things Hurd and Carly Fiorina slashed was the company’s research budget, though it seems Apotheker is not following this trend. The former head of software maker SAP is expanding the company beyond hardware with mobile, cloud and big data initiatives – something competitor Dell has also been doing as a part of an effort to stay relevant to the market, and increase its margins.

On the short-run, HP will be buying back another $10 billion its own stock on top of $10 billion it has already announced to restore investor confidence. The company also declared a cash dividend of 12 cents per share, and Apotoker is thinking ahead as well, where cloud and mobile come into play.

The electronics giant announced this week that it will launch a new thin client in August: the t5570e Thin Client will be running Windows Embedded Standard 7. Closer to the consumer end, there are some rumors bubbling that HP may roll out a cloud storage service of its own  for webOS devices.

It’s a multi-pronged approach Apotheker is pushing, with his experience in software providing insight and innovation to revive HP’s new direction.