In today’s theCUBE live broadcast from the HP Discover conference in Barcelona, Tim Crawford joined Wikibon’s Dave Vellante to discuss HP’s position as a provider for the enterprise and where they stand in relation to Amazon’s AWS offerings. Crawford is the CIO Strategic Advisor at AVOA.

HP has, according to Crawford, been making strides in bringing innovation to both their product and storage lines, but commented the company appears to be focusing on data. “It’s not just about Big Data or structured data,” he notes. HP is employing a comprehensive approach to data in general.

As discussed in an earlier broadcast today, Meg Whitman’s focus, as CEO of HP, was on the financial aspects required for her five year turnaround of the company. “In the past, [she] hasn’t emphasized data enough,” Vellante stated. Whitman’s keynote address, scheduled for today at the conference, will be interesting if she voices a vision for data that has thus far been lacking.

All the right ingredients

“They have all the right ingredients,” commented Crawford. “But do they have the right recipe?”

Crawford’s comment centers around the reality that most enterprises are still dealing with what might be considered traditional IT problems. They are, he claims, still a long way off from being able to address their own data needs and to do so intelligently.

• Navigating the new enterprise IT

HP can be effective at helping the enterprise navigate this new environment. To do so, they need to move from their more silo’d organizational structure to one that embraces integration. Crawford admitted he has heard more talk at this conference regarding integration across each of their services.

Of course, it cannot be integration for integration’s sake. “It’s getting past integration and moving to innovation and automation. Without that, it is just incremental improvements.” Improving incrementally, with its inherent slow implementation and iterations would be unwise, ultimately affecting the company’s overall speed and agility.

At Amazon’s AWS re:Invent conference covered last month by SiliconANGLE, a model around agility and fast failure was highlighted. If HP can’t mimic that model they will be left behind by the enterprise clients who understand the environment can and will move ever faster. HP also has their own advantage, being a legacy company.

“Amazon has a great product for what it does.” Their challenge, according to Crawford, is that they are claiming to be all things for all people and that simply is not true. “At the end of the day, Amazon has their own close-knit ecosystem they work with and that’s it.”

Competing in a new market with AWS

Longstanding companies like HP are realizing the direct competition and are pulling out of the AWS API market. This is likely a response to the one area AWS is maintaining some rigidity and that is in their unwillingness or inability to work with their partners.

While AWS has public cloud offerings, HP could well be positioned to be the cloud provider for the enterprise as they have both the HP PrivateCloud and HP PublicCloud. With those offerings, HP has been open and transparent about their strengths and current weaknesses. Crawford is taking a wait-and-see approach on whether this strategy will turn some adopters off or if that honesty will attract them to HP.

Ultimately, HP has to provide a clear and concise roadmap for the enterprise to be the provider of choice. They also have to assess whether or not the buyer is ready for the changeover from their traditional storage and compute models to the cloud and develop ways they can effectively influence a potential buyer to make the leap.

As noted above, Crawford commented on AWS’s ecosystem that was built to work around the Amazon solution. HP, he claims, has to develop a similar model for themselves. If they can achieve that milestone, their next goal should be to catch up to, and possibly even leap-frog, Amazon’s AWS.

Watch the full interview here

SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE will be broadcasting live from the HP Discovery conference in Barcelona through tomorrow, December 10.