HP CEO: The challenges of cloud computing

>> It sounds like you're saying there is a disruptive change, where technology, delivered as a service, rather than technology delivered as hardware and software components, you know, it happening, and that that's growing.

>> I think it's a very attractive model. I think there will be challenges to it. But, you know, you can imagine for a company like us, the fact that we can build a solution like where David and I were headed a few minutes ago, put them in a data center somewhere and offer it globally into an industry, and do it out of one common place with a lot of security and a lot of significant capability is a very attractive business model that we think can drive a lot of interruption in the market. So that's a positive. I do think we have hurdles, David. I think at the end of the day, when you go and tell a CEO, and if you're an IT professional, hey, boss, I've got a great idea, we're going to put our e-mails up in a cloud. You know, there are a certain number of CEOs that will say, no, you're not. By the way, if Mott phonetic, my CIO, told me, I've got a big idea, boss, just came back from a conference, we're going to put our general ledger and close the books up in the cloud inter-firewall. And I'd be like, go back to work, we're not doing that. So there's a whole set of things, from a security perspective, that frankly have to be overcome to make sure that we can keep the momentum going. Because the thing that will slow down a disruption faster than anything is a hurdle that you can't overcome. And we have to overcome them.

>> Well, I'm confused a little bit.

>> Okay.

>> You're saying that you wouldn't necessarily put e-mail in the cloud. You certainly don't want to put your financials in the cloud. And by this, we mean as some sort of external service.

>> So let me go back.

>> So where does it fit? Or do you think it's a bunch of hooey?

>> A couple of points. What was the word? So I think in the end, it depends whether you're talking, again, inter-firewall and intra-firewall.

>> Yeah.

>> I think intra-firewall, we can build a lot of tremendous cloud infrastructure and alleviate the issue that I just described. I think when you go inter-firewall, you're going to have to be able to prove, because, for example, we at HP, and I'm sure you all have examples that are far worse than ours, we get about 1,000 hacks a day. And they're more sophisticated sort of every month. And so for us, we get people that would love to get into all kinds of stuff. I can't 100% tell you why. But they seem to continue to show up. So for us, security, you can imagine, with our business on hp.com and all of the various e-commerce programs that we've got, security, reliability, our brand is a huge thing, David. So for us, security is a big deal. So it's unlikely that we'd put anything outside the firewall that was material in nature that we couldn't just 100% secure. Do I think the architecture plays well and can bring a lot of benefits? I do.

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