Robison characterised HP's strategy -- which attempts to align technology and business objectives -- as a "portfolio" and a "partnership" play. On the portfolio side, HP has a broad range of products and services aimed at different markets and industries. On the partnership side, HP has 14 major alliances, including companies such as Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, BEA, Samsung, Accenture, Deloitte, and BearingPoint. Each major partner relationship is managed by HP staff reporting to Robison and HP marketing chief Mike Winkler.
HP made a strategic decision to shutter some product development areas and to double down on others. For the enterprise business, the company hooked up with Intel on Itanium processors, withdrew from the middleware software business, focused on automating the datacentre and doubled down on its management software (OpenView) and document-management and production technologies.
Robison also described HP as a "general contractor," providing the integration of all the piece parts and acting as the single point of contact for installing and supporting heterogeneous solutions.
Perhaps that notion of a general contractor is the best way to characterise HP's centre of gravity as a solution provider. Fiorina claims that HP can do it all for customers compared to rivals, but implicit in that statement is HP's ring of strategic partners and the "buck stops at HP" integration approach.
Is HP fundamentally different from rivals in its general contractor approach? On the surface, all the major vendors and consultancies say they are focused on reducing cost and complexity, and on helping customers get more out of their current IT investments. They promise to take on the enterprise integration task, increase utilisation, and lead the charge to open standards-based computing.
Given that HP doesn't offer its own end-to-end software stack, like IBM's WebSphere, Sun's N1 or Microsoft's Windows, the company has less of an agenda to push its own wares, and is betting that open standards will ease the pain of integrating heterogeneous systems. In fact, HP professes a more agnostic middleware philosophy. HP supports both J2EE and .Net platforms in its offerings, whereas Sun and IBM are firmly in the J2EE camp and Microsoft is in its .Net world.
