HP CEO Meg Whitman, at the company’s annual meeting of its shareholders, made the pitch to investors that the company hasn’t lost its wave in the market. Whitman outlined HP’s various businesses and assessed, from a bird’s eye view, the strengths and weaknesses of each and their priority within the company — foreshadowing acute changes in coming months.
The “core” of this company is its infrastructure business, Whitman said: PCs, servers, printers, networking. “Let’s not run from that,” she said. “Let’s stand up and be proud of that.” HP matters. Without HP, the United States Navy can’t deploy ships. British pensioners don’t get their checks on time. Healthcare doesn’t get delivered. [The space station doesn’t function.] If HP doesn’t work, the world doesn’t work.
HP’s services business, then, is also a value add — “essential to making everything work for our customers,” she said, by creating long-lasting customer relationships. A revitalized HP, as envisioned by Whitman, must be the undisputed leader in converged infrastructure and application migration. “We want to lead in cloud, information optimization, and security,” she said.
“We’ve got market leadership in virtually every category in which we compete,” she said. “We need to build on those strengths to capture the future.” Last but not the least, “We have embarked on rebuilding HP in a very thoughtful way that is very true to the spirit of innovation…at this company,” she said. “We have a clear vision of where we want to go and what needs to be done…restoring HP’s rightful place in the technology industry.”
