John Gallant: Apotheker lays out new vision for HP -- details to come?

Computerworld - SAN FRANCISCO -- In 1993, after his first 100 days as CEO at ailing IBM, Louis Gerstner was being pressed to reveal his "vision" of the new IBM to come under his leadership. He famously responded: "The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision."

Instead, he said, what the company needed was "a series of very tough-minded, market-driven, highly effective strategies for each of its businesses -- strategies that deliver performance in the marketplace and shareholder value."

Even as he was implementing those specific, tough changes, critics harped on the "vision" thing and wondered whether Gerstner really had a blueprint for rebuilding the humbled computing giant. We know how that story ended.

In contrast, after four and a half months as CEO of HP, Leo Apotheker stood before scores of journalists and analysts here on Monday to reveal his vision for the new HP -- a vision that encapsulates a lot of today's hot buzzwords but was surprisingly thin on dates or details.

Apotheker, who took over in the wake of former CEO Mark Hurd's sudden departure, said HP will "provide seamless, secure, context-aware experiences for the connected world."

What does that mean? And, more important, how does that differentiate HP from the other major players in the tech business?

As expected, Apotheker made clear that cloud will be a key focus for HP, and he tantalized the audience by discussing plans for offering infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and an application store for both consumers and the enterprise.

But he said very little about how those services will be built or when they will be offered, beyond revealing that the infrastructure service is being rolled out "as we speak" and that HP will take advantage of investments it has already made in big data centers to support it.

The platform-as-a-service offering and the app store? Coming sometime in "2011 to 2012." The platform will support multiple development languages, but Apotheker didn't say whether it will be based on Microsoft's Azure technology or something else. (Microsoft and HP have jointly developed an Azure appliance for the enterprise.)

Apotheker also said that HP will use its considerable product portfolio, and its services unit, to help customers attain hybrid private-public clouds, but he didn't say a great deal about how exactly it will help them do that.

He sounded out a theme that he has voiced in a number of recent interviews: that HP needs to expand its software portfolio. He said that the focus will be on widening HP's management and security offerings, as well as its analytics capabilities.