HP’s CEO Meg Whitman recently said the company was shifting resources from PCs to tablets to catch up in the industry but ITKE’s Ron Miller believes it’s too little, too late for HP.

Tell us in the comments below if you think HP can make its mark in the industry with the Slate 7.

Disclaimer: All videos presented in the “YouTube IT Video of the Week” series are subjectively selected by ITKnowledgeExchange.com’s community manager

Events image via Shutterstock

Australia, England, Puerto Rico and Spain…IT events are springing up all across the world in February! See if you can make any of these great conferences.

1. Kaspersky Threatpost Security Analyst Summit (February 3-7, San Juan, Puerto Rico)

2. Parallels Summit 2013 (February 4-6, Las Vegas, Nevada)

3. Apps World North America (February 7-8, San Francisco, California)

4. TechTarget: Leveraging SAP HANA in-memory analytics for unparalleled speed, insight and performance (February 7, Houston, Texas)

5. Everywhereelse.co: The Startup Conference (February 9-12, Memphis, Tennessee)

6. Finance Transformation & CFO Forum 2013 (February 12-14, London, England)

7. Women 2.0 Conference 2013 (February 14, San Francisco, California)

8. 17th Annual International IT Service Management Conference & Exhibition (Pink13) (February 17-20, Las Vegas, Nevada)

9. Wireless Without Limits (February 18-23, New Orleans, Louisiana)

10. HP 2013 Global Partner Conference (February 19-21, Las Vegas, Nevada)

11. MODELSWARD 2013 (February 19-21, Barcelona, Spain)

12. TechTarget: CW500 Club (February 20, London, England)

13. VMware Partner Exchange 2013 (February 23-28, Las Vegas, Nevada)

14. Gartner Business Intelligence & Information Management Summit (February 25-26, Sydney, Australia)

15. TechTarget: Desktop Virtualization 2013 (February 26, Boston, Massachusetts)

16. TechTarget: The New Rules of Backup and Data Protection (February 26, Toronto, Canada)

17. TechTarget: Building Storage Systems to Support Virtual Environments (February 28, San Jose, California)

We’ll be sharing IT events each month here on the Enterprise IT Watch blog. Got an event to add to our list? Let us know via Twitter (@ITKE) or email. Going to one of these events? Share your takeaways (and photos) with us!

Dell image via Shutterstock

On November 4, 1984, Michael Dell founded the Dell company from his college dorm, selling IBM PC-compatible computers built from stock components. Now, it’s the third largest PC vendor in the world, behind HP and Lenovo, and is ranked #44 on Fortune’s 500 list.

We’ll award 250 Knowledge Points to anyone who can tell us which college he attended. (HINT: ‘Hook ‘em Horns)

Each Tuesday, the ITKE team will take you back in time, as we take a look at the events that have changed technology history. Have a tip for us? Email mtidmarsh@techtarget.com or find us on Twitter (@ITKE).

Disclaimer: All posts presented in the “This week in tech history” series are subjectively selected by ITKnowledgeExchange.com community managers and staff for entertainment purposes only. They are not sponsored or influenced by outside sources.

HP printer image via Shutterstock

On August 18, 1947, the technology giant HP was incorporated by William Hewlett and David Packard.

After selling their first products out of a garage in Palo Alto in 1938, Hewlett and Packard began selling oscillators, which were used to test audio equipment.

Ever since Disney began to buy oscillators to use in movie theaters for a certain ‘magical’ movie, HP has grown into a titan of the technology industry becoming the largest maker of Itanium-based servers, but it’s falling behind in the tablet race.

We’ll give out 150 Knowledge Points to anyone who knows the name of the movie Disney began buying oscillators for.

Each Tuesday, the ITKE team will take you back in time, as we take a look at the events that have changed technology history. Have a tip for us? Email mtidmarsh@techtarget.com or find us on Twitter (@ITKE).

Disclaimer: All posts presented in the “This week in tech history” series are subjectively selected by ITKnowledgeExchange.com community managers and staff for entertainment purposes only. They are not sponsored or influenced by outside sources.

Among the possible candidates, the Times and several other online news sources have named Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay. Her history with eBay, which began when the popular bidding site was just a wee start-up, seems to be a major draw for HP’s board. Apotheker has had less than a year to lead HP to where it currently is, and no matter your opinions on where it’s heading, the bad PR alone is reason enough for the board to start looking for a new face to front the company.

The day after Apotheker’s announcement of HP’s mobile shutdown, PC business spinoff, and entrance into the software industry, HP stock plummeted 20 percent. Yesterday, after reports of Apotheker’s possible replacement, HP stock rose. If that seems like a coincidence, perhaps the thrice-lowered sales forecasts and 47 percent drop in HP’s stock under Apotheker’s management are enough for the board to reconsider the hire. Also under reconsideration? The proposal to spinoff HP’s PC division as a separate company.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that HP will abandon its proposed venture into the cloud, as Jayson Noland, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co. in San Francisco told Bloomberg: “Hewlett-Packard isn’t looking to completely change course. The company’s board and shareholders are mostly looking for a surer hand.”

While the board might support Apotheker’s plan, they’ve more than lost faith in his ability to carry it out.

UPDATE: Not everyone’s too keen on the idea of Meg Whitman succeeding Apotheker.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

HP Cloud Compute allows you to deploy compute instances on-demand. It lets you customize your instances to handle your unique workloads and add new instances to quickly scale.

HP Cloud Object Storage provides you with scalable online storage capacity on-demand. Object storage is ideal for archiving and backing up data, serving static content for web applications, and storing large public or private data sets, such as online files and media.

The announcement comes on the heels of Dell’s entrance into the public cloud world last week. But while Dell’s platform is built on VMware’s suite, HP plans to offer its cloud without the bonds of legacy infrastructure. HP’s VP of cloud solutions, Patrick Harr, told Derrick Harris of GigaOm in June that HP intended to compete with big name cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, choosing also to focus on developers. I wonder if HP’s recent bucking of webOS – and the subsequent effects on developers – will have any bearing on the cooperation and excitement from the development community. Perhaps this will knock HP up on the scale of cloud computing vendors, but the likeliness of this ambition may be too soon to tell. HP is asking for feedback on the private beta program, crediting feedback from its first development stage for the state of the private beta offerings.

If you plan to register, I suggest doing it sooner than later to join the fun. If you do, let us know what you think!

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

And that’s the muddled message HP is sending when it literally owns every pixel, such as in the below advertisement (full text below):

When your corporate messaging looks like it comes from the world of tweener dramas, mixing professions of undying love (“Now, more than ever, we are committed”) with weasel-worded caveats (“our preferred course”), it’s hard to engender much trust.

And this strikes at the heart of the recent valid criticisms (Michael Arrington’s excepted): While the plan to remake HP makes sense at a strategic level, the public execution has been blunder after blunder. This has squandered years of good will and left HP with a sinking stock price and skeptical customers. Its time for HP to put the drama behind it and move forward, honestly and openly, in the direction it’s going to take.

The full text of the ad:

HP is the number-one PC maker on the planet. Every second, we sell two PCs somewhere in 170 countries around the globe. On its own, the HP PC business is a $40 billion company.

We became number one by staying focused on our customers and their needs-from products to service and support. You can count on HP to stand behind those products and warranties just as we have for over 70 years.

To ensure this, our preferred course is to spin off our PC business into a separate company, creating a more agile organization to help us better anticipate change and quickly respond to customers. This will give us the freedom to deliver the best new products at the best prices faster than we ever have before.

Millions of people around the world have yet to experience the power of personal computing. We see a future where they MI be able to own a PC for the first time, giving them the ability to learn more, create more, produce more, and improve the quality of their lives-things that simply can’t be done on other kinds of devices.

No one is better positioned thane HP to provide those opportunities. Now, more than ever, we are ccommitted to the future of personal computing.

For more,

go to hp.com/pcmatters

Update: Just saw Barbara Darrow had an excellent take on the exact same topic … including what happens to the customers-with-benefits caught in the middle.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

But as entertaining (or obnoxious) as Arrington may be to any given reader, his advice is terrible: He’s suggesting HP stoop from where they are now, the U.S. market leader in the commmoditized consumer PC market, to  being a late entrant competing against no-name Chinese knockoffs in the tablet market, competing on price.

While everyone’s marveling at the $100 price point of the TouchPad (I was in for two, full disclosure), the fact of the matter is there have been tablets in the price range before:

• KMart had one for $150.
• Pandigital had one for under $200.
• Walgreens had a $100 tablet.

A new hope

As a little background, if you haven’t heard: Léo Apotheker, who was named HP’s president and CEO a little over a year ago, announced that the company’s PC division was going to be spun off, and its mobile hardware division wound (although the company claims WebOS will live on in licenses). At the same time, it was announced that HP was acquiring a U.K. company called Autonomy, which dubs itself the pioneer of “meaning-based computing.” The technology looks like a mix of e-discovery, enterprise search and fancy graphs, with a business very similar to Apotheker’s last company, SAP. In fact, the acquisitions $10 billion price tag and Apotheker’s statements have made clear that this company is critical to charting HP’s future strategy.

“Autonomy has an attractive business model, including a strong cloud based solution set, which is aligned with HP’s efforts to improve our portfolio mix,” he said in a press release. ”We believe this bold action will squarely position HP in software and information to create the next-generation Information Platform, and thereby, create significant value for our shareholders.”

And while the release goes on to talk vaguely about how this acquisition “aligns” with the rest of HP’s IT divisions, the fact is Autonomy is a largely cloud-driven company which seems like it would benefit very little from any enterprise synergies, except as far as HP could de-commoditize cheap hardware by putting expensive software on it.

Show me the money

The strange thing is, I could find almost nothing, even among my tech press peers, about what this means for HP. It’s like everyone forgot that the division even existed except for as a vague synergy. But deep down on HP’s summary of its Q3 earnings, some hopeful notes:

Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN)revenue grew 7% year over year with a 13.0% operating margin. Networking was up 15%, Industry Standard Servers was up 9%, Business Critical Systems was down 9%, and HP Storage was up 8%. 3PAR revenue accelerated, with triple-digit year-over-year growth operationally.

That’s not the 20% growth the software side of HP saw, and they didn’t highlight margins or any actual numbers (Is it a tiny part of the overall business? Is it profitable yet?), but it’s a lot more enticing than the sales dud that was WebOS, particularly since the enterprise market is less fickle and easier to squeeze a long-term margin out of then consumers.

For some context, the company’s last quarterly statement included this breakdown (note that all numbers are in millions):

As you can see, while ESSN (HP’s catchall for their IT hardware) is profitable, but just chump change compared to the money they get from enterprise services and those higher-value options they can lay on top of their hardware. With that background, an SAP-ish future for HP makes a lot of sense. Particularly since, later on in the quarterly filing, HP acknowledges that it is fighting a way on many fronts, spreading itself too thin:

Unlike many of our competitors, we have a portfolio of businesses and must allocate resources across these businesses while competing with companies that specialize in one or more of these product lines. As a result, we may invest less in certain areas of our businesses than our competitors do, and these competitors may have greater financial, technical and marketing resources available to them than our businesses that compete against them. Industry consolidation also may affect competition by creating larger, more homogeneous and potentially stronger competitors in the markets in which we compete, and our competitors also may affect our business by entering into exclusive arrangements with existing or potential customers or suppliers.

I’ll take a look at the latest HP financial statements as they become available, and hopefully we can learn more about the fate of ProCurve and the rest of the HP enterprise hardware family.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Image via Flickr user John McNab.

So the big news of Cisco’s upgraded Catalyst 6500 should not have been that big a surprise, but it sure felt like a letdown. Last year, we got Cisco announcing they were blazing tracks into a brand new area for them – the tablet! – and this year, all we get it a refresh to a 12-year-old product. So can the humble tech press, myself included, be forgiven for highlighting “new” features like “IPv4 and IPv6 support” support, even those Catalyst 6500 has supported that for years? I hope so, because it’s an important and impressive product with an interesting strategy (“most” of the new features and capabilities being offered do not even require a full upgrade). And more importantly, it highlights Cisco’s new-found strategy: Retreat to move forward.

Cisco’s realized that, as great as its Nexus line is, many of its core customers, the ones coming year in and year out to Cisco Live for example, still preferred the old, familiar, conservative way of doing things. Why throw out Cisco IOS for something new and different when you can have an upgraded version of the old?

Which is exactly what Cisco’s delivered, coupled with a promise of much more bang for your buck than HP (claims the latter disputes). Or, as my colleague Rivka Little so perfectly put it, “Cisco served up comfort food for the networking masses on the first day of Cisco Live 2011, sidestepping edgy cloud announcements and focusing instead on a major Catalyst 6500 upgrade.”

It should also be comfort food for Cisco’s shareholders. Has Jim Duffy notes, the leaner, meaner Nexus series has slashed profit margins for Cisco on a per-port basis, just as its starting to lose marketshare to budget competitors. Promising a more reliable, overall cheaper experience might be one way to staunch the bleeding even as it remains free to break new ground with Nexus.

Now that that’s out of the way, I highly recommend reading Rivka’s piece, which dives into the deep details of what makes the Catalyst 6500 tick, including the excellent service modules Cisco’s rolling out that will bake in firewall (yawn) and incredibly granular quality-of-service that segregates not just voice but also priority of voice calls, for example (now we’re talking.

Check back soon for the one glaring exception to Cisco’s new found conservatism, or chime in the comments on what you think it is or, more importantly, what you think of the Catalyst 6500 refresh.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Check out our complete Cisco Live! Coverage guidefor more breaking news.