Meg Whitman Threatens To “Darken The Skies” With HP Staff

HP’s CEO Meg Whitman has promised to darken the sky, with tech experts “parachuted in” to help users with their IT needs. Announcing a new focus on security, she also warned of an impending “tech 9/11” at a meeting in London.

Whitman promised more focus on customers, and an increased emphasis on HP’s engineering strength, at HP’s Software Universe event in London. Saying she had “fallen in love” with HP, she made a bid to wash away its recent turbulent past, and announced three areas of focus for the future: cloud, security and “information optimisation” or Big Data.

You can’t kill vendor DNA

Since her appointment as HP CEO in September 2011, Whitman has emphasised HP’s strength in hardware, reversing an earlier decision to get out of PCs.

“A lot of people have asked me if innovation is alive and well at HP,” she said. “I can tell you the answer is yes. But we don’t always market it very well.”

HP’s origins were in engineering, and partnership within an open environment, she said. “Our partnership approach is in our DNA. It is the basis of this company. And It turns out you can’t kill founder DNA.”

Whitman has been criticised for her lack of experience within the IT industry itself, but she played this as a strength, claiming her experience as a customer of HP, IBM and Oracle would help her drive and celebrate HP’s customer focus. I started this job as a customer,” she said.

Her promise to “darken the skies” with IT experts was backed up with tales of almost military levels of customer service. “One customer asked us to help set up and maintain a system in Afghanistan,” she said. “A team spent six months working 24 hours a day wearing body armour. Our people actually volunteered to work in an active war zone.”

Whitman gave a quick run though HP’s strengths in various areas, claiming to be number one or two in servers, storage and networking, with energy-efficient servers, the StoreOnce architecture and a network range where the company is “having fun” being a disruptor against incumbent Cisco, offering better performance price and service, she said.

With a massive product portfolio, she promised to “simplify” both the products and the customer relationships.

She described the current IT sector as undergoing a “tectonic plate shift”, adding “I can almost feel the earth moving under my feet”. The move to cloud finally gives customers a new way to advance the way things get done, she said.

“The forces of cloud,social and mobile, will change the way technology is consumed,” she said. “New profit pools are emerging and old profit pools are in jeopardy.”

Promising a focus on security, she described the progression from hackers to theives, to big businesses which make a living out of hacking, and finally to terrorists. She warned: “There will be a tech 9/11 at some point,” and asked who user companies would want on their side when that happens. “We don’t have any priority other than yours.”

In the cloud, she spoke of HP’s commitment to converged “hybrid” clouds giving customers flexibility between in-house and public services. Explaining the importance of Big Data, she said that CIOs are struggling to make sense of all the information they have, and bracing for a new flood of data from sources such as sensors.

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