New HP CEO Has Storage Top of Mind in Introductory Speech

Sudden thought during Hewlett-Packard’s Summit event March 14 to announce new market strategy and introduce new CEO Leo Apotheker: The very first IT-specific feature he mentioned during his introductory presentation was data deduplication.

Should we read anything into that?

Apotheker (his name is pronounced “LAY-oh appo-TECKER”) began by talking about seamless connectivity, “everybody on,” and data being available anywhere. He could have referenced “servers,” “network,” “cloud” or any of a thousand other IT terms right off the top. But he referred to a storage term first.

The quote, within the first four minutes of his address, started in this manner: “In our labs, data deduplication, memristor and sensor technologies are being reinvented …”

Then, strangely enough, Apotheker didn’t mention anything more about storage the rest of the presentation — even in the Q&A session that followed. There was nothing about StorageWorks, 3PAR, cloud storage … none of it. Perhaps somebody should have asked him about where on his priority list is the HP storage division.

The Station would have, except that I had to ask first about the apparent conflict of interest in operating systems: the soon-to-be ubiquitous webOS versus the old standby, Windows.

Then, once a question is asked during a crowded press conference, it’s virtually impossible to ask another.

So that’s what we’ll ask Mr. (Don’t call me Doctor) Apotheker when we get to sit down one-on-one with him at some point.

Oh, about the “doctor” thing. When I questioned him at the press conference, I addressed him as “Doctor” Apotheker.

“Thanks for the promotion, but I’m not a Ph.D,” he corrected me with a smile.

So I guess next time I’ll be sure not to ask him: “What’s up, Doc?”