I started my career working in HP shops, so have a warm spot in my heart for HP.

I have concerns that HP is coming late to the party and needs to ramp up quickly in this area. Reading the blogs on the sight after signing up, I wasn’t sure that HP has a focused message about what Cloud Computing means to HP.

Right now I’m working with more and more SMB clients who are forgoing purchasing new servers and putting thier systems in the cloud. Since servers have about a 5 year life expectancy, I imagine the next 5 years will see a trend where businesses will be moving systems into the cloud.

I am optimistic though about HP. I think that HP has a strong hardware platform to build from. With some of the best hardware engineers to build hardware that could give them a competitive advantage when building out thier sites.

My one worry is that sometimes HP enters a new portion of the industry, then leaves after a few years. I could see HP building an end to end system that would manage everything from the desktop, through the cloud, edge technologies and to the backend core servers that would be very slick and competitive. HP has been focused on the managed services message for over 18 years. I could see them being very successful.