“We are a portfolio company,” Stephen Dewitt, Senior VP of HP Enterprise Group Marketing, said. “We operate from the client to the data center.”

During the HP Discover Conference 2012, Dewitt discussed the marketing tactics of HP as well as the services offered in big data and application transformation, which he described as “rich.” He stressed the importance of taking HP’s story and applying it to customers’ problem sets.

The company is currently going back to the basics with their marketing strategy. HP wants to wipe away all the drama, simplify the message and tell the story in a compelling and elegant manner.

According Dewitt, in the IT world, we are entering the most intense decade that HP has ever experienced and there will be large inflections, beginning with the cloud. The industry has been defined by silo technologies—storage, networking, compute—that have been historically delivered through denominations and sold to end customers on a price per port metrics, which is dramatically evolving. Dewitt predicts that by the end of the decade, all of the numerators and denominators will be wiped from the face of the earth and in turn will cause huge customer ramifications because capex is beginning to turn into opex.

Many businesses, such as banks, airlines, and even the movie production company Dreamworks, want a more “variabilized model” when speaking in terms of cash flow because it is very difficult to pour in thousands of dollars in capex into something in which the outcome is unknown. As a result, there is a huge change in how technology is delivered and consumed.

Beyond the surface of technology, there are a few inventions brewing, such as photonics and memristor technology, which fundamentally transforms the definition of a system.

Dewitt also explained how there will soon be more than 6 billion people online and 30 billion devices in the human population’s hands, and everything pertaining to education and business will be delivered as an app by the end of the decade. We are in a world consumed by apps. Companies are now able to innovate at the speed of light. And within this world, there will be over half a trillion e-commerce transactions every day of the week. Those who own businesses will want to have the ability to drive traffic and drive conversion, bringing goods and services to consumers, but according to Dewitt, you have to move at the pace of business, not the historical pace of IT.

What we will see in HP’s story is matching IT to the business requirements of today, both in the economic reality of today and the fact that we are moving to a borderless world—competing in every geography—where you have to align to the human experience in a simple manner.

So what separates HP from companies like IBM and Oracle? It could be the company’s approach to cloud, which is working to have a consistent architecture that’s open and built on open source, open standards and open philosophy. It could also be the amount of research the company does with its customers.

See Dewitt’s entire segment below.