Global CIO: HP Pressure-Cooker: The Top 5 Priorities For Tuesday's Call

2) Cloud Computing. Oracle last week offered a compelling vision for how it will play in the cloud, and whether or not that strategy proves to be the winner in the market, customers at least have a clear sense of what Oracle intends to do and how it intends to do it. Indeed, Oracle's formed a new cloud business unit to drive those plans, and has placed it under the direction of a high-level executive recruited from IBM, which itself has done a good job of showcasing its cloud products and plans. HP can't afford to miss out on one of the most powerful and transformative IT trends, and today it needs to show the world today that it's attacking the cloud opportunity with insight, confidence, and superb technology.

3) Mobile. In a research note late last week, Wells Fargo Securities senior analyst Jason Maynard included "What about mobile?" as one of his four key questions for HP to address today. That's the perfect way to frame the question: what about mobile, HP? Are you going to try to compete in smartphones with Apple and BlackBerry and Android—not to mention your good friends at Microsoft? Or is Palm all about printers? And what about tablets? And what about helping your CIO customers seamelessly weave corporate apps and data into bullet-proof mobile networks? In short, what about mobile?

4) Data Centers. A couple of years ago, under the brilliant work of executive vice president and CIO Randy Mott, HP completed one of the largest IT projects ever as it transformed the company's business processes and workflows in line with a parallel transformation of HP's global IT architecture, infrastructure, and operations. That effort—which has reduced HP's IT costs by billions of dollars—included the consolidation of 85 global data centers down to six next-generation centers. Has HP packaged up all that knowledge and all those lessons and all that technology into Transformation Solutions for its customers? If not, why not?

Here's Wells Fargo's Maynard on what HP must address with analysts about its data-center strategy: "The recent spate of enterprise-centric acquisitions further reinforces our point that HP has been late to adapt their strategy to the rapidly transforming and consolidating data-center market. We are concerned that if they don't successfully pivot and lock down their existing market share they are at risk of slower growth and margin deterioration. The pace of data-center change is happening even faster than we had contemplated, and in our view time is not HP's friend."

5) The New CEO. This spot, already high-profile given HP's global brand and its stature as the largest IT company in the world, has in the past two months taken on far greater notoriety with the board's sudden ouster of former CEO Mark Hurd in early August. While all the points raised above are extremely important and must be addressed by HP execs today and the CEO after he/she is in place, I would also urge that new HP leader to be aggressive in changing HP's image from "the world's largest manufacturer of PCs" (boilerplate language in the mainstream media) and "the infrastructure company" (Hurd's ineffective positioning of the company a year ago) to one that delivers to its customers not just superb products and technologies and services but also ongoing knowledge and business value and expertise.

In a recent column called Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard's New CEO: The Top 10 Challenges, I suggested a huge step in that direction would be for the new CEO to establish the HP Center for Business Value: "Demonstrate that new focus with a set of clear and ambitious goals around customer retention and brand trust, around setting new technology-performance standards, and around the delivery of new levels of definable business value to customers (and thereby to shareholders) that no one else in the industry can match.

"On that last point, I would recommend a long discussion with your longtime partners at SAP about their "value engineering" portfolio, which is a knowledge base of customers' processes, best practices, innovations, and more. Is there a Center For Business Value in HP's future?"

HP finds itself at a point where its capabilities can offer enormous potential for future growth and success, or where its sheer mass might be overwhelming the company's ability to move opportunistically with great focus and speed and energy.

Today's analyst call will tell us a lot about which direction HP is headed in.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard's New CEO: The Top 10 Challenges

Global CIO: Burying Mark Hurd: Hewlett-Packard And Its Future

Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard CEO Hurd's Strategy: The Infrastructure Company

Global CIO: Why Hewlett-Packard Must Articulate Its Enterprise Strategy

Global CIO: An Open Letter To Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd

Global CIO: In Praise Of Mark Hurd's 9,000 Layoffs At Hewlett-Packard

Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard's Missing Link Is Analytics

Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard CEO Hurd Shifts Strategy Toward Services

Global CIO: Inside HP's Numbers: Mark Hurd's Top 10 Strategic Insights

Global CIO: IBM & Hewlett-Packard Battle Over Booming Mobile Market

Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard Attacks Innovation Gridlock That's Killing CIOs

Global CIO: Are Oracle, HP, Cisco & IBM Too Big To Innovate?

Global CIO: IBM Claims Hardware Supremacy And Calls Out HP's Hurd

Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard's Hurd Creates Growth Engine In R&D

Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard's Hurd Says Bad IT Means A Bad CEO

Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard Recruits Microsoft To Raid Sun's Customers

Global CIO: Oracle Dumps HP After Co-Creating 'Most Successful Introduction Ever'