Las Vegas – Leo Apotheker may look like a reserved man on stage at the Americas Partner Conference, but his keynote address he was anything but voicing his displeasure with Oracle’s recent decision to pull support on its products running Itanium.
HP’s CEO, who’s been on the job for five months called the decision “clumsy”.
Earlier this week, Oracle announced it would discontinue all software development on Itanium after discussions with Intel and other moves by Microsoft and Red Hat to end Itanium support.
Apotheker also described Oracle’s halting development for Itanium:
“An attempt to provoke;”
“Anti-competitive;” and
“Self-serving at the detriment of customers.”
HP (NYSE: HPQ), which ships the vast majority of servers based on the processor, still believes in Itanium and will serve the needs of customers going forward. Apotheker added that HP would commit another 10 years of development for Itanium with its HP UX and Integrity server line.
In his hour long keynote, Apotheker updated the channel partners on the situation in Japan, outlined his cloud vision and security. He said that HP has hired a third-party supply chain company to make sure no contaminated product reach the market.
The former SAP boss was also clear about HP’s cloud computing direction. HP will be a broadbased cloud provider. “The future is in the cloud. Its less complex and it costs less and HP will be working to create a platform for the cloud and connectivity,” Apotheker said.
The cloud will help HP move into higher valued services that used to be called middleware, he said. HP’s cloud offering will support multiple languages and be open to trusted channel partners.
Kent MacDonald, vice president for Calgary-based solution provider Long View Systems, hopes that HP’s desire to become a broadbased cloud provider doesn’t mean it will compete with the channel on the hosting of cloud services. “I want to see them execute with the enablement of the channel to build and capture the cloud market,” MacDonald said.
Other competiting solutions such Vblock has a headstart, but MacDonald believes that HP can bring some more excitement to their cloud brand and programs.
“I have been very impressed with the vision and technology around cloud that HP is bringing to market and Long View is excited with our mutual potential to win with cloud.”
Also part of the cloud strategy going forward will be a consumer App Store. He said that these apps will be vetted by HP only for security and applicability. “HP Cloud will send appropriate services to connected devices and altogether be part of a complete ecosystem. We will deliver context aware experience from the home to the enterprise. HP is the only company that can integrate all of this. From the cloud to the devices,” Apotheker said.
The connected devices will encompass printers, Pcs, smartphones, TouchPads, and WebOS. “In the open cloud marketplace size does matter and we can get to 100 million devices per year and all of them will touch the cloud,” he added.
HP also put a heavy emphasis on mobility and with that comes security.
Currently HP is a surprising No. 5 in the security space, Apotheker said. “We do not want to stay at No. 5. We want to be No. 1. The worse case is to be No. 2.”