Just back from San Francisco, where I attended the 2011 HP Summit. I was eager to understand HP’s rebooted strategic mission in the communications and media sector after five months with new chief, Leo Apotheker, at the helm.
Not surprising was the huge focus on “cloud enablement” for telecom operators—HP makes a strong case for itself in helping network operators build a business around cloud services. HP has much of the required end-to-end stack covered for cloud and has added key capabilities via acquisitions of companies such as cloud-storage player 3PAR. It points to its brand strength in the consumer space, network expertise, developer ecosystem and Palm assets as key differentiators.
Joe Weinman, who leads global industry solutions for communications, media and entertainment at HP, brings instant credibility to their message. Joe came to HP via AT&T and has long been at the forefront of cloud computing thought leadership. In another life Joe would make a fantastic industry analyst, as he has written several research papers on the topic in his spare time. Check them out here.
The personal systems group had a major voice at the show. There was much discussion about the advantages of the webOS platform in terms of user experience and development environment, in particular for enterprise applications. A few devices were passed around, including a new Pre and a phone called the Veer. Veer is a credit card-sized device that is an antithesis of the big-screen smartphone; it might find its niche with users who aren’t interested in running video but still want a robust feature set. WebOS will also run on HP’s iPad competitor, the TouchPad.
Under Palm, webOS fell way behind the present-day mobile OS titans Apple and Android. HP believes it can catch back up. Executives blame its current position on Palm’s lack of resources and ability to execute. HP thinks the combination of better tools, stronger “economics” and its focus on the unique requirements of enterprise applications will get them back in the game. Certainly admirable goals, but HP will need to invest heavily to overcome the momentum Apple and Android has built. It could be too little too late.
Back in December 2009, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) and HP announced a strategic alliance that was positioned as a first of its kind. The vision at the time was to form a revolutionary strategic partnership that fell in lock-step with an industry witnessing the strategic convergence of network and IT. ALU was on hand at the Summit to provide a check-in on progress. This was, not surprisingly, a love in, but a look under the covers shows execution is still lacking in winning large deals together (although they’ve gotten a few).
The biggest obstacle in the relationship is related to overlap in the telecom solution portfolios that make sales engagement contentious. If both sides could agree on a divide-and-conquer strategy and incent their respective sales teams to work in collaboration, the relationship could become truly strategic and beneficial to customers. There is still a ways to go to get there.
I found it interesting that HP has de-prioritized positioning the OpenCall branded products. It has seemingly given up that fight in terms of marketing its network credibility in areas like HLR/HSS and media servers. The ongoing power shift from network toward IT and cloud has led HP to decide it is better off focusing on its ample capabilities there, which makes sense.
The acquisition of Vertica should serve the telecom business well for HP. Real-time business analytics for large and complex sets of data represent a huge opportunity as operators figure out how to leverage their vast amounts of data to sell more, plan better and keep customers happy. This could become one of the more important assets in the telecom portfolio if the technology turns out to be as strong as advertised.
I’ve always found HP to be an interesting player in the IT eco-system. Not quite at IBM’s level for services and not the software juggernaut that Oracle is in software, it always seemed to be playing catch-up with the big guys. In cloud it sees an opportunity to leapfrog the competition and its ability to sell its stack to network operators will be a critical harbinger for future success.
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