HP’s Léo Apotheker: We’re heading to the cloud

A day after Hewlett-Packard CEO Léo Apotheker outlined his strategic vision for HP — a plan chock-full of new cloud offerings — he sat down with IDG Enterprise Chief Content Officer John Gallant and InfoWorld Editor in Chief Eric Knorr to share his thoughts on a wide variety of issues in this latest installment of the IDGE CEO Interview Series. In this conversation, Apotheker, who’s been with HP just over four months, talked about why HP is better positioned than IBM to help customers deliver on the promise of cloud and how he plans to rapidly eclipse the likes of IBM, Oracle, and others in the analytics market. (Short answer: Apotheker will leave old-school BI to the other players. HP’s focus will be on analytics and Big Data.)

When it comes to the server market, Apotheker isn’t shy about assessing Cisco’s prospects, saying John Chambers and company are neither a threat nor an annoyance: HP simply doesn’t see Cisco in sales situations. Apotheker also has strong views for IT executives on how consumerization and the cloud will reshape their jobs and their role in the corporation. Read on for more on HP’s mobile strategy and cloud offerings, how HP’s service offerings will evolve to support private cloud, and how HP needs to “sell itself” better to customers, investors, and partners.

John Gallant: When you were announced as CEO, there was some surprise in the industry. What do you want to tell our readers about why you’re the right person for this job, at the right time for HP?

Léo Apotheker: I’m almost tempted to say I don’t think I need to answer that question, but I won’t go that far. There must be more than one person as the right person to be the CEO of HP. I would be pretty arrogant to believe that there is only one human being on the whole planet who is capable of doing that.

This being said, I believe that I bring to the table a certain number of unique assets, like any other human being when they’re brought to the table. Mine is to have a pretty broad view on what information technology is and where it can go, and then translate that into a strategy and then into an executable plan. I think that’s the main reason I am where I am. And some of it you’ve heard yesterday and today.

I think we have been able as a team, and I take the responsibility for this, to articulate an encompassing, spanning vision for HP on a given direction we want to take this company, and I think there is buy-in within the company to go and follow that route, which is important. You can’t travel on that journey all by yourself. Having spent a lot of time with customers, I believe many customers will respond to this equally well. And I will work very hard to transform this vision into reality, which is why I think I was the right person for the job.

Gallant: You mentioned that you spent the past four months or so out talking to employees, talking to customers, talking to partners. What is the perception of HP among those different communities right now? What did you find in talking to them?

Apotheker: A lot of good news, and a few things that we need to fix. First of all, HP is a trusted brand among customers. People really like HP. People enjoy working with HP, and I have actually met many customers who all said the same: They would love to buy more from HP. So that’s very good.

Our employees are committed, passionate people who really know their stuff. They’re very good. They want to be more engaged, they want to feel more connected to the company. They want the company to have a vision of where it wants to go.

Actually, our customers want the same. And in all fairness, so do our investors. Everyone kind of converged in saying, “We know that you’re good in this, you’re good in that, you’re good in a whole bunch of things, but give us an overarching kind of a perspective. What is HP all about and where is HP going and what is HP’s view on cloud and connectivity and such and such?” It was great encouragement to do what I wanted to do on day one, which was to actually describe an architecture for the future; an operating model and an architecture for HP; and a vision, a technological statement, and a business statement of where HP should be.

Now, what do we need to fix? We need to address the fact that when a customer really wants to work with HP, along the entire breadth of the portfolio, we need to make that a lot easier for our customers. It’s not always easy for a customer to span the bridge across all of our silos. We need to fix that, and that’s work in progress. We need to make sure that we have better interoperability, that technology is actually doing some of the things that we really want people to understand emotionally as well as being a total embrace of technology. We’ll fix that too. But all in all, I think HP is a formidable company that has great assets, it just needs to bring them together in a very powerful way and deliver that value to the market.

Gallant: Léo, what did you mean when you told Businessweek that HP has lost its soul?

Apotheker: Well, HP is a company that had a very distinct way of being. HP is not just — and I don’t want to sound arrogant again — but HP is not just any other company. There’s a history behind us: the HP way.

Gallant: A storied way.

Apotheker: It’s a storied way. I mean we’re not talking about just some management guidebook. We’re talking about a culture — we’re talking about a way of being, a way of doing things. And over the last years, I think that the HP way has been oppressed a bit, and the HP way is the soul, the heart and soul of HP.

Now, that doesn’t mean that they have to be nostalgic, go back to the past, and in the past everything was beautiful. That’s not what it’s about. But there is part of that culture that is a highly relevant, highly vital culture to HP. We need to embrace that, we need to modernize it, bring it — if I may say so, have HP Way 2.0. It’s hard to talk about a company of 120,000 people in 170 countries, but you can use technology to do that. I mean, you know what I’m saying? We kind of lost that, and we’re bringing it back. I want people to be proud to wear the HP badge.

Gallant: If you were to identify a single, most important thing that brings it back, what would that be?

Apotheker: Customer-centric innovation that HP was extremely good at. HP was always great at identifying next technologies and really bring them to market not as technologies, but as things that people could actually immediately use. And there are many, many examples of that. I think we gave a glimpse of what we’re capable of doing again, from that perspective at least, by bringing the vision quickly to market with the demo we showed this morning with our analytics capability. We brought that stuff together really quickly. And that’s what people really want from HP: Bring innovation quickly out of the lab to the customer.

Gallant: How much of a cultural shift is it for you, from running a software company to working what’s largely been a hardware-centric company?

Apotheker: It’s been pretty easy. Both of them touch essential parts of the IT stack. You can’t really be a good software executive if you don’t understand something about hardware — that’s what you need to run the software. And I don’t think you can be a good hardware executive if you don’t understand the software. So I’ve been learning a lot about the hardware, and it’s great. It’s a great technology. I am much more fluent today than I was four months ago, that’s for sure.

Eric Knorr: So now comes the part where we try to find out a little more detail about the cloud announcements of yesterday. The three parts appear to be infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and an application store.

Apotheker: And connectivity.

Knorr: Connectivity as part of a cloud offering? Maybe we could start there because I’m not quite sure what you mean by that as a cloud offering.

Apotheker: Well, you’re right, it’s probably not the purest definition of the term a “cloud offering,” but I think these two worlds are coming together. The mobile world and the cloud world are kind of blurring together, and if you can’t provide connectivity for all of the things that are happening in the cloud, you could almost wonder, why bother to have a cloud in the first place?

I mean yes, there is scalability. Yes, there is dynamic flexing, and yes, there are all of these nice things. But one of the other great advantages of the cloud is that if you combine this with networks, you have the capability to consume and render and input into the clouds from mobile devices, which I think is going to be a megatrend as we move forward.

Knorr: So beyond unified communications?

Apotheker: Oh yeah. Just go to the rapidly developing, fast-growing economies in the world. People just jump a bunch of generations and are immediately mobile.

Knorr: So at the press conference you said the infrastructure as a service capability is available as we speak?

Apotheker: Yes, for enterprise customers.

Knorr: So that means you’re offering hosting or Amazon-like capabilities to enterprise customers now?

Apotheker: We have many enterprise customers who want to use infrastructure as a service for a whole bunch of purposes — a myriad of purposes — and that service is available as we speak for enterprise customers. We’re going to make that available as a public cloud as well, but for our enterprise customers that service is available.

Knorr: So that would be the first to be rolled out?

Apotheker: Yes.

Knorr: And you mentioned that you didn’t really need to build out the infrastructure to support this infrastructure as a service, that it was already built. So is this part of a secret project before you started? Is it a gain from consolidation of resources? Or is it an announcement more to repurpose existing infrastructure? Where did that infrastructure come from?

Apotheker: With the exception to the secret plan, all of the above.

Gallant: Is there a name for the infrastructure service?

Apotheker: Not yet, no.

Knorr: Any notion of the development environments that will be available on the platform as a service?

Apotheker: Yes. Basically all of them. All of the development environments that the developers like to use: Java, Ruby on Rails, et cetera.

Knorr: You spoke about helping customers get to a hybrid public/private cloud model. How will you help companies do that?

Apotheker: I think there will be as many combinations of these three elements between traditional and on-premise private clouds, public clouds, semi-public clouds, as there are enterprises. And one of the reasons where things don’t go straight into the cloud is the legacy of the applications. Some of these applications would be very hard to move into the cloud if you don’t want to provoke a rainstorm and the cloud collapses.

HP has already a lot of experience in helping customers make these decisions, make the trade-offs, and then help people move into these hybrid environments. We actually create hardware and software to manage hybrid environments. Some of our technology allows people to have a complete end-to-end vision of all of these mixed architectures and operate them as one. We have a real competitive advantage in doing that.

We can do it rather easily because we have no legacy on the application side, so we have nothing to protect. We have no database to protect or whatever, and therefore we can actually take a very neutral and customer-centric view on what is the best solution for the customer. And that’s what we’re all about.

Gallant: Specifically on that front, I wanted to ask you — does the set of offerings from EDS change around helping customers get to those hybrid cloud environments?

Apotheker: So in order to respect my branding people, EDS doesn’t exist anymore.

Gallant: Your services arm.

Apotheker: HP Enterprise Services. And yes, the offerings of HP services have been evolving quite substantially since the original acquisition of EDS. Right now we have trained many people at EDS to better understand our converged infrastructure, to operate Matrix software, [to learn] our cloud enablement capabilities. We want to do workshops with customers, help them understand the potential of cloud, and then decide which for them is the best route. Moving forward, usually we also then act as the technology partner for that customer.

Knorr: In the broad portfolio of capabilities that you’ve presented, it seems to overlap almost 100 percent with what IBM is doing. How do you intend to differentiate your strategy from IBM’s approach?

Apotheker: I would qualify it slightly differently: IBM overlaps 100 percent with us. I mean, HP has been doing these things for years — we didn’t really call them out this way — but this is nothing really that revolutionary or new.

But we actually have one, if not two, strategic advantages over IBM. One is we understand the consumer business, so therefore we understand the endpoint devices. And that is a huge advantage, which IBM has given away when they sold their PC business to Lenovo. And secondly, we have deep insight into security and manageability, which helps us to secure and manage the entire stack in cloud — and that is a second immense advantage that we have over IBM. We are agnostic to a certain number of technologies, which they are not, by definition, and therefore we can really optimize the best solution. We can mix and match, and that gives us a significant advantage as well.

And maybe last, but not least, we don’t have any legacy to protect, so we can really leapfrog to the leading edge and we don’t have to worry about cannibalizing this or the other part of our legacy software business because in that space we don’t have enough.

Gallant: I want to drill down into a couple of areas regarding IBM. One is your cloud strategy versus theirs, both companies talking about helping customers get to that next evolution of IT. Your approach differs from theirs in what respect?

Apotheker: I don’t know, you should ask them.

Gallant: We have spoken to IBM on many occasions.

Knorr: Well, they don’t really have a public cloud offering.

Apotheker: Well, about the things they don’t have — they don’t have a public cloud offering, they don’t pretend to have an open marketplace where you can have at the same time consumer and enterprise applications. What we really aim for is that individual within an enterprise, the famous — for the lack of a better term, forgive me if it’s a horrible term — “prosumer.” People who want one device on which they can have their private and their professional life nicely separated, where they know in confidence that privacy is privacy. And when a company knows that confidentiality and compliance is also guaranteed, we can provide this.

We can provide this because we still have a foot — a pretty big foot, actually — on the consumer side of the business. IBM can’t provide that. They might talk about it — I mean talk is cheap. But delivering all of this is a whole different story.

Gallant: And a couple of other areas to drill down into, because these two companies …

Apotheker: I would rather talk about HP than talk about IBM.

Gallant: Well, I’m trying to help people understand …

Apotheker: They should just read all about HP, and then they’ll understand.

Gallant: This is a perfect opportunity. You mentioned yesterday that you’re not playing catch-up in analytics or BI to IBM. Can you explain that, given the size of its BI business today?

Apotheker: You said it very correctly. It’s BI. I am not into the BI business; I’m into the analytics business. BI, and I should know a little bit better than many people at IBM probably, is a backward-looking technology. BI is nothing else than reporting, just called with a fancy name.

And I’m sure you’ve been looking at this for many, many years in your career: a data warehouse. If you want to build a data warehouse, if you don’t know the kind of questions you are going to ask in advance, you don’t know what data you have put in there. And by the way, data warehouses are essentially populated with structured data.

Big data analytics is something totally different: the capability to combine structured data, which is growing only at a linear rate, with unstructured data that is exploding. It is the unstructured data that puts context on the structured data. That is what we are all about. And again, we can jump there straightaway because we have no constraints. I have no DB2 to protect. I have no old Cognos to protect.

It’s nice, but that’s yesterday’s technology. It’s all happening in memory, it’s all happening on very fast huge-scale capabilities of weeding data, putting it into context, and then coming to a whole set of new conclusions that are not certitudes but that are giving you context to make better decisions.

I’m not trying to compete on reporting because the world has enough reporting capabilities. We are trying to create a market which, by the way, others are going to do as well, which puts decision-making into a whole new way of looking at things and giving people context and guidance and intelligence into making way smarter decisions than ever before.

Knorr: So your analytic strategy goes beyond Vertica then? Because Vertica is really a columnar database, right?

Apotheker: Of course. Well, Vertica is a columnar in-memory database, which is why it’s so fast. But it won’t stop there.

Knorr: So Hadoop, MapReduce-style, large unstructured data? You haven’t announced any plans beyond Vertica, though.

Apotheker: No, we usually make something happen first, then we announce it.

Gallant: I think it’s very interesting for our enterprise IT readers to learn more about the app store, because mostly what they know of app stores is that they’re consumer products, consumer apps. What should people know about this? What is there for an enterprise IT person to understand?

Apotheker: Well, you know, it would give CIOs an opportunity to put at the disposal of the users apps that can be easily consumed by employees of the enterprise that have been certified, approved, secured, and were conformed to IT strategy and IT procedures and processes. Some of them can be very large apps, but then you don’t really need to put them into an app store. Some of them can be more short-term things. An application to manage your expenses, an application to use your touchpad in order to capture your expenses — you know, scan them with a camera, upload them, and you are done. A whole bunch of things that will make life a lot easier, a lot simpler.

Then of course there are all of the apps that you could use when it comes to analyzing and looking at data, so it becomes a real catalog of capabilities that can be dynamically managed. If something gets corrupted, something gets polluted, you can take it out. You can immediately remove it from all of the devices if you have such a capability — you can bring your things on-stream. It becomes a completely new way of interacting, where I believe CIOs could close the gap in a significant fashion between the old dilemma that you’re delivering value for the business users and actually being ready on the IT side. I mean, we all know the story about the time it takes between the expression that a consumer, that a user has, for IT to deliver it. This will shorten the timeframe significantly.

Gallant: I’m from Boston, but now that I’m out in California, I can say — that sounds cool.

Apotheker: It does sound cool. It is awesome as well.

Gallant: Awesome. If I understand that correctly, you will have an app store, but this is technology that a CIO could also use in their private cloud environment to create an app store capability?

Apotheker: Sure, of course. Yes. All the things we talk about will always be available also in the private cloud.

Gallant: Yesterday, when you were asked about whether there would be any leadership or organizational changes that may be needed at HP, you declined to talk about that. But do you think that such changes are necessary? And if so, when would we learn about them?

Apotheker: I think I will give you the same answer as yesterday: Today we talk about strategy.

Knorr: In that case, how about SMB strategy? What is your SMB strategy? Often SMBs are the prime adopters of public cloud services. How do you plan to attack that market?

Apotheker: We embrace that. HP has a storied history of working with channel partners. And when I came on the job, we talked about customers, we talked about employees, we talked about shareholders. We didn’t talk about partners. I did reach out to many partners in all of the countries that I visited — and I meet with partners on a very regular basis. And they are an indispensable part of our go-to-market capability and our capability to deliver value to customers.

If you look at the clouds, if we can create the right kind of platform and tools — and we are going to have that — so PaaS is an important element of our strategy. And that kind of an environment will create space for our partners, for our VARs and ISVs, people who want to become ISVs or whatever else, to create capabilities and applications on our cloud in the most effective way possible so that they can service their customer service.

Knorr: Verticalized applications.

Apotheker: Verticalized, superverticalized, or very geographically specific or any combination of the above. By the way, if we’re doing this really well, then our open cloud app store, enterprise app store, could actually be a great way for our partners to make more money, because suddenly they have a much wider market for whatever intellectual property they would create.

Gallant: I want to talk about the network space. Over the past couple of years, HP has done a really good job bringing the networking group tighter into the fold and getting more value out of that for customers. What do you see as key to competing and winning in the network space right now against the Junipers and the Ciscos of the world?

Apotheker: The good news is we must be doing something right, because quarter after quarter after quarter after quarter, we are gaining substantial market share. We have great technology. We cover a lot of space when it comes to networking. Our price-performance ratio must be very optimal because we just — forgive me the expression — but we, to use the American vernacular, “beat the crap” out of the competition. And that’s good, we’ll continue doing that.

One of the reasons why we’re capable of doing this is not just because our networking gear is so good; it’s also because we have this converged infrastructure approach, where people don’t just buy networking with storage or service, that you buy the whole solution — which is what they really want. And because it’s all optimized internally as well, it has a double-whammy effect. So far, so good, and we’ll continue down the same path. We’ll continue to innovate in our networking gear of course, just to keep the competitive advantage. And we can go many places.

Gallant: How would you respond when people like [John] Chambers or others say that really the threat from HP is just a lower-priced alternative — it’s not a strategic alternative for customers in networking?

Apotheker: That’s an interesting argument. With all respect to John, if we can do the same thing at a cheaper price than what he does, why wouldn’t that be a strategic alternative? Help me understand what is a strategic alternative then?

Gallant: I think he’s talking around things like fabric architectures and the vision of the next-generation data center network.

Apotheker: That’s what we’re talking about converged infrastructure, except that we have it. He’s still in the PowerPoint version.

Gallant: Speaking of Cisco in the server market, is it a threat or an annoyance to HP?

Apotheker: Neither.

Gallant: Can you expand?

Apotheker: We hardly ever see them.

Gallant: They claim that sales are growing pretty rapidly of the UCS system, but you’re not seeing them in competitive situations?

Apotheker: They must be selling on planet Zircon.

Gallant: How do you spell Zircon?

Apotheker: Any way you want.

Gallant: How are you weaving 3Com assets into the overall story?

Apotheker: 3Com is totally integrated into our networking capabilities. The guys in ESSN [Enterprise Servers, Storage, and Networking] under Dave Donatelli’s leadership are doing a great job. It is now really selling extremely well as a stand-alone solution, but it fits beautifully into our converged infrastructure as well. We do really get a double-whammy effect.

We are quite capable of using our 3Com capabilities when we talk about next-generation data centers that we actually deliver. We have many customers that we are now bringing into the cloud or springing up private clouds in less than 30 days. And part of it is, of course, also attributable to 3Com.

Knorr: With tablets, what will you be offering the enterprise that Apple can’t?

Apotheker: Well, I think two things: There are a certain number of native things that are built into WebOS that made WebOS into a very unique proposition. The best way to describe it is that it’s capable of truly multitasking, it’s capable of really sharing information, and it’s able to synergize a lot of the things that are happening in the Web. The reason for that is it’s the only operating system, Apple’s included, that has been designed from the ground up to assume that you’re always connected. So that’s point No. 1.

And point No. 2 is that we are capable — and that’s the thing that makes HP rather unique — of totally securing and managing these devices for an enterprise with our technology. The CIO can be absolutely at ease with knowing that the devices he will get from HP, he will get something that is totally secured, absolutely manageable. He can switch these things on and off whenever he wants, for any user, and all of the capabilities that are developed with it.

Knorr: What technologies specifically?

Apotheker: You take the classical dilemma that you have as a CIO when you give someone a mobile device. How do I make sure that it’s being used in an appropriate way? How do I make sure it’s being used in a compliant way? How do I get it out of the user when the user isn’t with the company anymore? And if the user doesn’t want to give the device back, how do I deactivate it — instantaneously? These are trivial questions, maybe, but they are hugely important for CIOs. Compliance is a topic that keeps many people awake at night, I can assure you of that.

And maybe last, but not least, but they will come together with the cloud of the convergence again as a capability that we will be able to give people to manage two lives on one device.

Knorr: Now to the question: WebOS and Windows together on the same devices. Given that Microsoft has announced that it’s going to have a gesture-based operating system, doesn’t that capability then with WebOS become somewhat redundant? And doesn’t it point more toward WebOS as a replacement rather than something alongside Windows?

Apotheker: For years to come, we will ship our PCs, laptops, whatever, desktops on Windows with WebOS. They actually complement each other really well. The fact that Windows, that Microsoft, supports ARM going forward is a very important announcement that enables these kinds of things to happen in a very natural, very nonfrictional, and very complementary way. If Microsoft Windows will support gesture-based operating systems, that’s good. You make an assumption that you should never make, which is that we will stand still and nothing will change with WebOS. That’s not the kind of world we’re living in, are we?

Knorr: That kind of begs the question of where WebOS is going.

Apotheker: Fair question. I’ll talk to you next time.

Gallant: Léo, I know it’s early in the tablet market, despite all the noise about the iPad, but do you envision that the tablet market will split into a consumer tablet market and more of an enterprise or professional tablet market?

Apotheker: I can easily imagine some tablets being rugged for certain environments where the normal, nicely designed, pretty, delicate tablet might not really work that well — on an oil rig or whatever. That’s conceivable; I can imagine that.

I do believe that the tablet technology is not going to stand still, either. It’s going to have many iterations. Over time I think we’ll see many iterations of form factors — highly probable. I think we’ll see some tablets that will morph into netbooks or borderline netbooks, and netbooks that will morph into borderline tablets. I think we are going to see many iterations of this evolution.

Gallant: One of the things that happened with the desktop revolution was that corporate IT stepped in and said: These are the standards, these are the machines we’ll buy and support.

Is that horse out of the barn already with the tablet? Is it too late for enterprise IT to do that with the tablet?

Apotheker: I think enterprise IT will have to do that, only because of security and compliance concerns, and that’s basically one of the markets we’re going to aim for.

Gallant: To the extent of saying this is the tablet we’ll support?

Apotheker: Yes.

Gallant: Versus any tablet?

Apotheker: Yes.

Gallant: You talked yesterday about the consumerization of IT being one of the major trends. Extrapolate out five years. What is the impact on IT? How significant a change does it force IT to go through?

Apotheker: Well, five years is a long time in IT, so this is a dangerous prediction. Let’s stop at three.

Gallant: Take it as far as you feel comfortable.

Apotheker: Which is kind of real risky, but I’ll go to three. I think the first thing is that it will force corporate IT to have significantly faster innovation cycles. That’s going to have a massive impact. It’s going to have a massive impact on all of the applications that are being used. Some of the good old client/server or even older applications will simply not be used anymore by the millennial workers, by that generation, because they won’t even want to touch this kind of stuff. Context-aware applications are going to be really important because that’s what the consumer is having already today.

So geo-location, there’s a context-sensitive device, enhanced reality, all of these things will have a profound impact on how the professional user or consumer will want to use corporate IT, and I think corporate IT is going to have to adapt to that really quickly or people will just go outside all the time and get some cloud service somewhere and will simply pretend that they are using corporate IT.

Knorr: As far as private cloud is concerned, it’s not really clear the form that the private cloud is taking in the enterprise right now. What’s your vision of that?

Apotheker: That’s a great question. Private clouds, in my opinion, for at least the larger enterprises, will become full-fledged cloud services in their own right because, as we just talked about, they will also become a great tool for corporate IT to actually have significantly faster innovation cycles so they can really adapt or adopt some of these things we just talked about. If they just stick to the appliance kind of thing, they won’t be able to do all of the innovation they need to do on the application side — at least not fast enough.

In a real cloud environment if they have the entire cloud capability, it’s then when they can start to transform some of the backbone and then really have the infrastructure that they need to quickly embrace whatever is happening in terms of functionality, in terms of ease-of-use, in terms of context, in terms of the activity of the things that we’re seeing in the consumer market.

Gallant: A year from now, people will judge whether you’re successful by what — beyond things like the stock price. If you’re an enterprise IT person, HP will be different under your watch how a year from now?

Apotheker: A year is probably a little bit short to take HP to this entire thing that we’ve been talking about.

Gallant: Go with your three years again.

Apotheker: But I would hope that corporate IT will view HP as a truly trusted advisor when it comes to topics such as next-gen IT, how to get there, how to deliver a value to the users, and how to really make IT again a very exciting place where information is delivered at the best possible rate and speed.

Gallant: So you don’t feel that the cloud threatens IT, that ultimately it becomes much easier in many cases for business units or individuals to go around IT to get what they need?

Apotheker: You know, that’s a great question.

Gallant: And I think this is what a lot of our readers are wrestling with right now.

Apotheker: Let me put it this way, and I sincerely believe this: Cloud is like any other technology. It can be used in one way or another way and, as we just discussed, cloud can have many iterations and rendering capabilities, private to public. So let’s just look at the technology and forget how it’s being distributed or commercialized.

The cloud technology is neutral technology. If corporate IT embraces this technology to make it into a real tool to provide information and technology to their own users and use it as a tool to innovate significantly faster, therefore shorten the gap between business and IT, then I think it’s going to be a formidable advantage for corporate IT to use the cloud. It will actually give them a whole new lease on life, if I may say so. If they won’t, yes, there is a bit of a danger that people will simply give up on ’em, if I may use that expression. And they will still use corporate IT for all of the heavy back-duty, back-office transactional things. And for all the other stuff, they’ll try to go around.

Gallant: This is a company that’s been through a number of changes over the past decade. You’ve had a chance before you came in and while you’re here to really take a hard look at it. What are the myths or misunderstandings about HP?

Apotheker: I think HP is a company that hasn’t done a very good job in selling itself. HP has such a rich collection of assets and such a wide portfolio that it should be used by professionals and consumers alike in a totally different light than the way it’s being viewed today. I’m not saying it’s being viewed badly, but I think it’s being undervalued, and I think we have a great opportunity to put HP where it really belongs.

Knorr: Was that part of the intent of yesterday, when you gave quite a long list of announcements, particularly regarding the cloud, without a lot of details or a very specific timeframe? Is this part of selling HP in a different way?

Apotheker: It’s part of making sure people understand which direction HP is going. We want to be transparent so that there are no surprises. And so we will deliver step-by-step all of the things that we talked about — all of them. It wasn’t necessarily the best place to go into lots of detail about every element, or it would have been a 10-day conference with one day per topic. Even then I don’t think we might have covered the entire ground. You’ll hear us doing this more because I want to make sure that people understand where HP is going and why HP is a great partner for many people.

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