Data Central Exclusive: Rob Enderle analyzes HP’s cloud strategy

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Following CEO Léo Apotheker’s keynote at last Monday's strategy summit, HP execs Shane Robison and Dave Donatelli gave a more detailed look into the $143 billion* cloud computing market, HP’s plan of attack, and some of the solutions HP already has in place.

Of course, you can always watch a replay of Shane and Dave’s presentation here (it begins 1 hour, 22 minutes, and 30 seconds into the program) and review their slides.  But we thought it’d be helpful to add an expert’s take to the conversation, so we asked Rob Enderle (principal analyst with Enderle Group) to share his thoughts on HP’s strategy.

As usual, Rob had a both educational and insightful point of view.  His point about how servers, storage, and networking must converge to meet the design requirements of the cloud deserves particular notice (as does his surprising analogy to HP’s successful strategy to dominate the imaging and printing market).

Take a moment to read Rob’s analysis below -- published in full -- and let us know any thoughts or counterpoints in the comments or on Twitter (you can find Rob on Twitter @enderle and HP @hpnews). 

For more on the HP Summit, check out last week’s post.

Rob Enderle, Enderle Group

The biggest and fastest growing opportunity for technology companies is in the concept of flexibly hosting services on the internet.  This concept -- which embraces everything from the web side of iTunes and YouTube (for consumers) to email and storage repositories (for businesses) -- is called “the cloud.”

HP is applying the same strategy that allowed them to dominate the printer market to this data center/cloud opportunity.  That strategy is based on a focused attack by the entire company on the singular idea of a simple, flexible, affordable solution that was easy to use, easy to implement and competitively superior to the alternatives.

To accomplish this they had to acquire networking, strengthen software, and bring the server and storage groups onto the same team so that the solution could meet the design requirements.   These efforts are particularly attractive to enterprise companies, which represent the largest class, because of the massive opportunities for cost savings and the huge potential to simplify what currently is an excessively complex data center environment.

While this is still a work in progress, HP is further down this integration path than any other vendor in their class.   

Notes:

*2013 expected market estimate, HP internal analysis