HP circles software wagons in Soul Group
April 1, 2011
New HP CEO Leo Apothker's search for the company's lost soul has sparked a revival of the HP Way this week, when the company announced a return to the HP Way that created MPE, reskinned Unix, and bought VMS and NonStop. The four operating systems will enter a new group that's led by webOS, one that analysts are calling the Soul Group.
Apotheker, speaking at this week's America's Partners conference, introduced new vice president Bryan Humphrey as leader of the growth markets group built around HP's unique software environments. Even though nearly 10 years have elapsed since the company shucked off futures for the 3000's OS, Apotheker's drive toward an HP Way 2.0 will expand opportunities for the software so central to his company vision.
"HP has tremendous resources in its software intellectual property," Apotheker told a cheering audience in Las Vegas. "We've built the advantages a competitor cannot duplicate. We will eschew the mantra of Microsoft everywhere with millions of PCs and printers. Hardware comes and goes, but software lives forever."
One thunderbolt to the 3000 community came in the announcement of purchasing the SRNW emulator group, a skunkworks project that has been developing an MPE skin that runs on Intel hardware. Humphrey, whose background runs back to the HP Pinewood days of NewWave, said that PCs sit ready to take the 3000 OS into businesses. "Our CEO's search for the lost soul is over," Humphrey said from the stage of the Bellagio casino theatre. "There's nothing but opportunity left for our Deep Soul environments. We want to show the world what HP built, and then lost. We're driving these vehicles into the cloud and onto desktops.
"It's time for something new," he said in a statement. "HP has software built to change business and enrich lives, from the cloud to the backoffice to computers you can touch. I'm delighted to help the company boot up HP Way 2.0."
Matthews announced that a new streaming dramedy series, Soul Food, is already being produced to sell the soul concept. Tyler Perry will direct spokes-pitchmen and actors John Hudgins and Justin Long (the PC and Mac from Apple's commercials) as well as T-Mobile's darling Carly Foulkes in hour-long episodes delivered for free through HP's newest datacenter facility in Fort Collins. Foulkes, a Canadian actress who's been mistaken for a new star in the AMC series Mad Men, has been exploring her options since the ATT buyout of T-Mobile seems to have put her work in those commercials in jeopardy.
"This is one Carly who's going to deliver better notices for HP's inventions," Humphrey said. The 49,960 square foot 10-megawatt research facility in Fort Collins, which houses 10,000 servers and 10,000 sensors, is being tapped as the source for online streaming that uses Amazon's Brown Box cable, built outside of the recent bandwidth restrictions announced by ATT. Orders for the Soul Group systems will be managed by MPE, delivered via VMS, and security-proofed using years of breach-plugging experience via the new LockBox privacy suite from the HP-UX labs.