Hewlett Packard this week rolled out its first high-profile product in a “shot” meant to improve the company’s position and role in today’s Cloud-centric IT and business environments. In doing so, the company promised a significant disruption. What Saugatuck sees is recognition by HP that it cannot leave its legacy hardware business behind as it blazes a path toward a Cloud-enabled future.

HP’s Moonshot, formally announced Wednesday as “disruptive innovation” by HP, is a high-powered-yet-energy-efficient rack-style server that HP hopes will become must-have hardware for large data centers, especially those powering Cloud services like SaaS, social networks, analytics, and cloud-based infrastructure.

Tech news and analyst channels are a-twitter today after the news that Hewlett-Packard Chairman Ray Lane is stepping down, along with two other directors.  Meanwhile, Dell’s efforts to take itself private have spawned a series of “he said, they said” exchanges via news outlets regarding company value, strategy, and direction. And Microsoft is, once again, being considered irrelevant by media outlets because of the decline in sales growth for traditional PCs and its perceived lack of significant growth with Win8, Windows Phone, and the Surface hardware line.

It’s gotten to the point where, over coffee this morning, one otherwise-sane CIO asked me if his firm should stop buying anything from any of these Master Brands. He doesn’t want to commit significant money to firms that, as he understands it, “could be out of business in a few years.”

What is Happening? — This week (15 – 18 Oct.), the OpenStack Summit is being held in San Diego, CA. Saugatuck believes this event, which combines sessions for developers, users, and administrators of OpenStack Cloud software, points out that the fundamental benefits of Open Source software can bring value to many aspects of IT including the underlying infrastructure of private and public Clouds.

However, Saugatuck believes that most efforts of the OpenStack group, as well as other Cloud-oriented “open” groups like CloudStack, The Open Group, and even the Open Grid Forum, will deliver limited benefit to enterprise Cloud users, mainly because these efforts tend to miss a core enterprise user Cloud need for openness and standardization: The ability to migrate and utilize workloads in Clouds, between Clouds, and between Clouds and on-premises IT (i.e., hybridized environments). Without this, such groups, while doing great work, are not developing / delivering Interoperability for users, as much as they are defining, developing and delivering new products. 

Over the past week-plus, Saugatuck participated in several Cloud Analyst events and briefings by Hewlett Packard, in person and via teleconference. As of today, all the information imparted to us is no longer under NDA by HP, so we’re ready to share some of our initial thoughts.

The most important information that HP has delivered to us, and to their clients and partners, is that the firm now has a comprehensive, coordinated, cross-unit Cloud strategy. This is massively significant for HP itself, and for its customers and partners, and should lead to dramatically increased efficiencies and profitability for HP along with increased competition across most Cloud IT markets.

Hewlett-Packard made a huge stride toward unifying what has seemed to be a too-fragmented organization and culture withthe announced merger of its PC and printer units. From an office/business buyer point of view (whether enterprise or SMB), it seems like an obvious and long-overdue move to us, and one that can and should deliver wins all around – if HP is able to manage the transition and blending of operations and responsibilities smoothly.

In our experience, HP business units traditionally operate as businesses unto themselves, practical fiefdoms with limited inter-unit communication and coordination; and that communication has tended to be at the highest levels. HP is not the only large firm to operate in this manner. It’s  a time-honored tradition that can force efficiencies when well-managed.