When Meg Whitman took over the reins as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard in 2011, the former eBay head and one time candidate for California governor told investors she will turn the struggling hardware maker around within five years. Three and half years later, Whitman is on her way to fulfilling that promise.

The executive brought with her much-needed leadership stability to HP, which had seen three CEOs come and go in the span of one year and was left with a greatly diminished engineering capability following the controversial departure of the first on the list, Mark Hurd.  He was blamed by many observers for setting back the company’s long-term growth with a series of aggressive cost cutting measures that earned Wall Street’s favor but hampered product development, a strategic failure left to Whitman to clean up.

That she has, at least on the corporate side. The eBay veteran reshuffled the HP management team to the point of near unrecognition and realigned the vendor’s organizational structure with her bold plans to move to the forefront of the megatrends that are disrupting enterprise IT today. The changes were apparent at the recently concluded HP Discover summit in Las Vegas, where SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE crew, John Furrier, Dave Vellante and Dave Frick, wasted no time digging into the latest updates to identify how far the company is on Whitman’s innovation roadmap.

“HP is clearly focused on the recovery, but there’s two things going on that I want to highlight: one is that Meg Whitman – this is from sources close to the company – is absolutely committed to making sure that the existing divisions don’t get sidelined,” Furrier highlights in a wrap-up segment concluding theCUBE’s coverage of the first day of the conference.

“At the same time you start to see the emergence of what I call the ‘elite forces’ – nimble teams that can jump quickly,” he adds.  “That will either be the foundation for the transitional markets or new markets in and of themselves.”

Specifically, HP is concentrating its efforts on building out its cloud portfolio and further capitalizing its analytics assets, notably Vertica and Autonomy. Mobile however doesn’t appear to be too big of a focus point for the company at present, Vellante notes, despite the fact that it too is becoming an increasingly important priority from a competitive standpoint as the number of connected devices continues to rise in the enterprise.

It still remains to be seen whether Hewlett-Packard will be able to catch up to that growth, but Furrier is confident that it has what it takes to stay on top of the market. Frick shares the same view.  In a segment with Furrier the next day, he expresses faith in Whitman’s strategic determination, especially around “The Machine,” a new homegrown computing architecture based on ultra-fast memositor technology that HP claims can keep data available even after losing power.

“She’s driving a lot of this new innovation that’s really an extension of Moonshot in terms of lower power usage, re-architecting based on today’s technology and not just adding to what was developed in ’50s,” he remarks.

Equally important to HP’s long-term vision is OpenStack. Adoption of the open-source cloud platform has thus far been mostly confined to the developer community and the cloud service provider space,  Vellante notes, but it will likely turn out to be a winning bet.

“It’s one of those deals that if they don’t do it, what are they going to do, they’d spend a lot of resources on something that’s gonna be a short-term band-aid,” he explains. “They’re making the right move, which is trying to leapfrog everyone else.”