HP tries to make waves over the Web
March 1, 2006
Tomorrow morning (well, 8:30 Pacific US time, 16:30 GMT) HP will hold a Web seminar featuring its CEO, the head of Oracle and the CEO of Intel. As if that weren't enough computer business firepower, the show will be hosted by Geoffrey Moore, author of the seminal marketing text Crossing the Chasm, the book whose descriptions included Late Mainstreet, to sum up the HP 3000 position as of the late 1990s.
In order of cumulative exposure in the industry, you'd probably rank Oracle's Larry Ellison No. 1, Moore second, and Intel's Paul Otellini third. Newest to the power circle is Hurd, who picks his public appearance carefully. HP's not saying very much about the content of this Web broadcast except to describe it as tougher in tone that what you might expect. HP says it will be:
A compelling interchange on the future of enterprise computing streamed live over the World Wide Web. You won't want to miss it as these leading executives take enterprise computing issues head-on.
You will hear from three CEOs whose companies had combined 2005 revenues of more than $135 billion. What might be more worthwhile than the 40 minutes they speak, however, will be the postscript to the presentations: Mark Hurd taking questions over the Internet customers and partners who are watching. Well, a quarter-hour of them, anyway.
HP is streaming the event without any registration required, as far as we can tell. Add up the number of customers touched by these companies' products; you might get quite a traffic jam-up. Or not, depending on how the markets feel about such an event. It might be something like the "interview" Hurd did in Orlando at HP's Technology Forum. On that stage he handled questions lobbed from a key marketing executive VP. It was interesting to see him in action, but surprises were not part of the agenda.
They may not be on tomorrow's menu, either. But just about anybody could work their way to the top of the question queue; it's more of a lottery than the line-up which talk-radio producers use to get callers on the air.
There really are not any homesteading issues that a CEO would address in a conference like this, but there could be some insights on how HP is going to step up adoption of its Integrity/Itanium line. This might not be so important to the 3000 customer just stepping into migration today; several years could go by before they need to commit to Itanium hardware. But to Itanium they must go, eventually.