A long time back, satirical rock star Frank Zappa was famous for quipping, Just what the world needs – another record label. We could remake that, maybe, as Just what the world needs – another vendor getting cloud religion.
That could be the reaction in some quarters at least to the news that HP is set to re-organise itself as a cloud-facing operation, with CEO Léo Apotheker telling the Street and press this week that he has demanded the firm develop its own Internet services and create a consumer and business-friendly application store of its own to boot.
"We intend to be the platform for the cloud and connectivity," he announced this week in California, giving as justification the observation that, "The world is connected, people to people" and that ‘people want information where and when they need it".
The announcement came as part of a vision statement on the future shape of HP, marking a kind of final ‘I’m here and this is what I will try and do’ programme by a man who’s spent a relatively long time (4.5 months) settling in since his October 2010 arrival (though we can of course attribute some of his tardiness to the embarrassment of the SAP-Oracle scrap he had to dodge a bullet or two from).
Apotheker explained his silence since appointment as being necessitated by a thorough period of rolling up his sleeves and digging into his new employer’s $126bn business.
"I’ve discovered extraordinary strengths [in this process]," he told his audience, "but also areas where we need additional strategic focus."
And so what has he found? A need for change and a shift in emphasis, it seems. Apotheker’s vision has a consumer tech element in it, which is fair enough for a company that wants to pick up the pace and get away from a period of sales (and to some extent product) stagnation.
Thus the HP TouchPad will get a hefty push when it is officially on the market in June to help it compete with the iPad 2. But consumer tech is just part of the desired Apotheker reboot, which also emphasizes connectivity and software (er – again).
It’s a huge, valuable company, with 300,000 employees, many of whom are incredibly smart and as Apotheker says, is "one of the world’s most profitable brands". But the world is changing and the environment is being redefined and HP needs to change to deal with that world.
"Consumer innovation cycles are pushing enterprises to adapt and at the heart of all this the confluence of Cloud and connectivity is fundamentally changing the way information technology is delivered," he added.
So think less printers (yes, we know) and more about HP taking on those bad boys Salesforce, Google and Amazon on their native soils.
What to make of all this? HP’s had a few remakes (think Fiorina). Saying consumer tech and the cloud is The Church Of What’s Happening Now is hardly the most radical thing one can conjure up, which may lead us to wonder if HP is doing a me-too here (hence our tongue in cheek Zappa reference).
But – Apotheker is a smart guy with a good CV. Let’s give him a chance here to make an impact. The way to do that is less what happens with TouchPad, by the way, and more on how convincing HP’s cloud work will be; and that means how many of its customers it can take on that journey, primarily.
