Oracle claims Itanium has reached the end of its life – although Intel and HP haven’t told customers that – and in fact deny it – and says HP should move to the x86. HP is suing Oracle to force it support Itanium to protect its Itanium revenues, which are now shrinking in part because of the uncertainty Oracle has injected into the market, down ~23% last quarter.

HP CFO Cathie Lesjak said just the other day that Oracle’s position has made it hard for HP to close Itanium deals.

Evidently caught out by Oracle, HP is now suddenly saying that customers “need the availability and resilience of Unix-based platforms along with the familiarity and cost-efficiency of industry-standard platforms.”

So it’s going to harvest key HP-UX and Itanium technologies and transplant them to Xeon, Windows and Linux.

It means to build a common, modular HP BladeSystem architecture for Itanium and the x86, a sort of a half-way house where “clients investing in a mission-critical Converged Infrastructure today with Integrity and HP-UX, if desired, can evolve to a mission-critical Linux/Windows environment in the future.”

It claims the new development roadmap will involve innovations to its Itanium-based Integrity servers and NonStop systems and their proprietary HP-UX and OpenVMS operating systems although how much effort it puts into its Tandem and DEC inheritances remains to be seen.

It will mean delivering Xeon-based blades for its Superdome 2 enclosure, a project code named DragonHawk, and for its Integrity c-Class blade enclosures, a project code named HydraLynx.

The scheme envisions “fortifying Windows and Linux environments with innovations from HP-UX within the next two years” and will take the co-operation of Microsoft, the Linux community and the hypervisor folks. It may mean applications have to be rewritten.

Business Critical Systems (BCS) general manager Martin Fink said in a statement, “Clients have been asking us to expand the mission-critical experience that is delivered today with HP-UX on Integrity to an x86-based infrastructure. HP plans to transform the server landscape for mission-critical computing by using the flexibility of HP BladeSystem and bringing key HP technology innovations from Integrity and HP-UX to the x86 ecosystem.”

Fink told the Wall Street Journal HP has been planning this move “for a long time.” Evidently the idea of simply porting HP-UX to the x86 doesn’t have much traction with the market.

DragonHawk is supposed to let users run HP-UX workloads on Itanium blades while simultaneously running the same or equally mission-critical workloads on Windows or Red Hat on Xeon blades in the same Superdome 2 enclosure. The object, HP said, is to “deliver the full mission-critical experience on x86.”

It’s talking BladeSystems with 32-socket x86 symmetrical multiprocessing systems that scale to hundreds of cores.

HydraLynx is supposed to put two-, four- and eight-socket x86 server blades in BladeSystem’s c-Class enclosures along with mission-critical virtualization and availability.

Intel will have to do some tinkering with its future Xeons and firmware to accommodate HP’s intentions.

Linux applications are supposed to get their availability tickled complements of a reprise of HP’s Serviceguard widgetry. HP-UX uses it to automatically move application workloads between servers in a cluster in the event of a failure or an on-demand request. Microsoft’s got its own clustering so that one less thing for HP to worry about.

The flexibility and availability of x86 systems are supposed to be boosted with HP’s nPartitions (nPars) mojo for partitioning system resources across multiple or variable workloads. Used on Integrity and Superdome machines, nPars is electrically isolated to eliminate failure points so users can “scale out” in a single system.

HP says it will also embed its Analysis Engine for x86 in system firmware to automatically repair complex system errors and use its fault-tolerant Crossbar Fabric to boost the reliability and resilience of the x86 systems. HP’s Crossbar Fabric intelligently routes data in the system for redundancy and high availability.

HP claims it’s not forcing customers and their mission-critical workloads to adopt Xeon-based Integrity and Superdome blade servers.

However, Meg Whitman Monday in her first conference call with Wall Street seemed to paint a different picture. “The BCS business is a declining business. It is a slow decline, but I don’t think you’re going to see an accelerating growth rate in that business,” she said. “And so we just have to manage that as best we can and invest in R&D so we get to a new platform as fast as we possibly can that allows us to service the clients that need this kind of power.” Apparently she’s expecting remaining customers to bolt for the x86 door.

Odd that HP would call the project Odyssey considering how long it took Odysseus to reach safe harbor and what labors he had to go through to get there.

HP paired up with Microsoft earlier this year on the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, which runs Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse. This new HP Enterprise Database Consolidation Appliance for SQL Server is its transactional counterpart.

Microsoft describes it as the first out-of-box data consolidation widget good for rapid virtualized private cloud deployment with no software changes.

It should be out next month and is supposed to deploy new database instances in minutes, reduce operating costs by maybe 75%, simplify management, save floor space, energy and infrastructure, and ultimately handle thousands of database instances in a scalable virtualized private cloud environment.

It can ultimately fill 10 racks, up from an entry-level half-rack. A single rack offers 192 logical processors, 2TB of memory and 59TB of storage.

Microsoft claims zero downtime live migration, and real-time database VM load balancing as well as high availability.

Pricing has yet to be disclosed but the ROI should be in two years.

There’s also a new HP VirtualSystem for Microsoft, launched Tuesday based on the same architecture as HP’s all-in-one CloudSystem and optimized for virtualized Microsoft Hyper-V applications. It will eventually scale to 6,000 virtual machines and also go on sale in November.

It’s meant to consolidate Microsoft workloads such as SharePoint, Exchange and SQL Server and includes Microsoft System Center, HP Insights and HP Converged Infrastructure software.

The widgetry employs HP x86 server and BladeSystems, HP FlexFabric networking and Lefthand Networks arrays or 3PAR storage.

The pair is chasing primarily mid- to large accounts with the machine but it will also be proposed to small account against Dell’s vStart appliance that supports less than 100 VMs.

It’ll cost around $175,000 to start without the Microsoft software.

The VS1 model supports 750 VMs and VS2 is supposed to be good for 2,500. The VS1 widgetry involves two ProLiant machines with two six-core Xeons, 96GBs of memory, two 146GB disks and two 10GB Ethernet ports. The VS2 uses two-socket six-core Xeon BladeSystems each with 48GB of main memory and two 146GB disks, which should support 535 VMs to start and cost $425,000.

HP already has VirtualSystems that support 750-6,000 VMware VMs, but the reportedly cheaper Microsoft widgetry is supposed to compete with vBlock systems from the Cisco-EMC-VMware combine.

Next month HP plans to release Itanium-based HP-UX-run VirtualSystems for Superdome 2 to compensate for Oracle refusing to support Itanium anymore. They’re supposed to run CRM, ERP and financial apps. No pricing yet.

In an unexpected move, Ray Lane, who put Whitman on the HP board in January, was named the company’s executive chairman. As non-executive chairman, Lane was very much the power behind Apotheker’s throne. Now apparently he will be Meg’s Gray Eminence. He said he was there “to support Meg,” same thing he said about Apotheker.

The two are close because Lane helped Whitman out when she ran into problems at eBay according to what some Yale guy said on CNBC. At least they know each other as customer and vendor from the days when she was at eBay and he was at Oracle.

The change in Lane’s status, which is likely to be remarked on at some point by Lane’s old boss, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, more closely resembles the speculation last week that Lane would get the CEO job when Léo fell and in fact Lane admitted during the conference call that followed the announcement that he had considered stepping into the slot on an interim basis.

Lane said he had found “weaknesses in parts of the business” and that Léo was let go because of poor execution, failed leadership, lack of understanding HP’s various businesses except on a cursory level, and poor communications skills, which culminated in the disastrous August 18 announcement that HP would spin out or sell off its PC unit, abort its nascent drive into webOS-based tablets and smartphones, and buy Autonomy for a king’s ransom.

Since the board blessed the plans, it’s not backing off them, which is why HP’s stock was down again after-hours to $22.60 after Wall Street plunged a very nasty 4% during the session.

Investors don’t want to hear that the board is indecisive about what to do with the company’s giant $41 billion PC arm. Delay is losing business and HP CFO Cathie Lesjak got on the horn long enough to say revenues this quarter would be worse than the $32.1 billion-$32.5 billion Léo predicted in August when estimates were for $34 billion but by some financial gymnastics HP will still make his predicted ESP of $1.12 to $1.16 compared to estimates of $1.31.

Although Lane has now decided that HP is a hardware company – something else he said Léo didn’t realize – the best he and Meg could do was promise a decision on the PC unit by the end of the calendar year. Betcha they decide to keep it. Betcha they say so in a few weeks.

In another slap at Apotheker, Lane said he had banished the word “transform” from the HP lexicon. “We will have more services and software but we’re a $120 billion hardware company.”

Insiders claim the only reason HP is sticking by the fatal August 18 strategy is that Lane was part of the troika that included Léo and chief strategy and technology officer Shane Robison that reportedly persuaded the board to rubberstamp the plan.

Meanwhile, it’s still quite possible that dissonant shareholders who have lost half their money since HP tossed out Mark Hurd may make a bid to dump the whole board and substitute their own slate. That slate may then make some management changes. They’ll have to live with the Autonomy acquisition. HP can’t get out of it and it should close by the end of the calendar year.

Whitman pledged to turn things around and mend fences with the investment community, but said it would take time to rebuild confidence. She has met with HP’s Executive Council to discuss how they will work together and boost employee morale. “The organization’s been through a lot,” she said.

There are of course widespread doubts about Meg’s skills and her purely consumer background, her inability to grow eBay passed the $7 billion mark, and her pricey acquisition of Skype for $2.5 billion which ultimately forced eBay into a $1.4 billion write-off. Skype now belongs to Microsoft.

Lane bushed aside the issue of Whitman’s hasty appointment and said he was acquainted with all the candidates and there’s none better. Possible insiders aren’t ready and Meg apparently presented him with a plan for the next six month and the next year.

In answer to questions about the board itself he said it’s not the pretexting board or the board that fired Hurd or the board that hired Apotheker. He saw to that in January by bringing in five new people and getting rid of four troublemakers. He never dealt with the fact that it is the board that sanctioned the August 18 plan and okayed the Autonomy acquisition.

Bloomberg claimed that Apotheker was blithely unaware that he was about to lose his job until Wednesday when the news broke that he was about to be ousted. The notion that he hadn’t a clue seems a bit farfetched given that he was gagged last week and replaced by Lane at two outside meetings where he was expected to discuss HP’s strategic direction, but the men did same to have a tin ear.

Not after his disastrous stock-crippling performance August 18 when he announced that HP would spin off its $41 billion PC unit, kill its newborn webOS devices and buy an unknown British software company for most of the money it has in the bank while cutting guidance for the third time in a row.

Léo’s keynote appearance Monday at an InformationWeek 500 conference was cancelled at the last minute and he was replaced by HP’s non-executive chairman Ray Lane who brought along HP CTO Shane Robison for technical support.

The same thing happened the next day at a Deutsche Bank conference. Lane showed up, Léo didn’t.

Lane got a pretty good review at IW500. One of the pub’s reporters wrote, “The intellectual jousting match that’s typically part of an Apotheker interview never materialized. Instead, the straight-shooting Lane gave the clearest vision yet for where HP wanted to go and why it was making the moves it was.”

However, the substitution, in addition to all the other baggage Apotheker is carrying, has Silicon Valley openly speculating that Léo could be sent packing after HP closes its fiscal year on Halloween – no sense upsetting the current quarter anymore than it already is – and that Lane will replace him (although that brace of companies Kleiner Perkins recently sold HP– ya know, Vertica, Fortify, ArcSight – might give him an anxious moment or two).

There are also rumbling’s – probably idle – of HP having second thoughts about Léo’s proposed $11 billion acquisition of the British software house Autonomy.

Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi doubtlessly has something to do with that.

On Tuesday he issued a report uncharacteristically critical of HP’s top management and its board that said, “Based on our conversations with investors, it appears that the overwhelming majority of large HP shareholders remain opposed to the HP/Autonomy deal following their conversations with senior executives and the board.”

They’re “exasperated” because HP is paying 11 times Autonomy’s $41 billion in sales for an addressable market that HP figures is only growing at about 8%.

But because HP agreed to pay cash, Sacconaghi said HP doesn’t need shareholder approval and without some heart-stopping material dirt on Autonomy probably has to go through with it.

Never a prize and now supposedly loaded with friends of Léo (though they’re probably more friends of Lane), HP’s board came in for more heat because it approved the Autonomy deal and the decision to announce a possible spin-off of HP’s PC operation without having a plan.

HP directors only serve one-year terms so activist shareholders could seek to replace them ahead of dumping Léo if need be. Nominations have to be in between November 23 and December 26 to be voted on during HP’s shareholders meeting in March.

Sacconaghi toyed with the idea of Oracle, its only “realistic potential suitor,” buying HP, allowing that it’s not “completely implausible” given Larry Ellison’s “boldness and unpredictability,” but he still counts the chances of that happening pretty low.

Rather, he thinks “that if HP’s results don’t improve, the company will ultimately restructure its portfolio and/or replace its leadership, either of which would likely serve as a catalyst for the stock.”

Despite the handsome 64% premium it offered – which one would think would have Autonomy shareholder thrusting their shares in HP’s jeans – HP has had to extend the deadline for getting 75% of Autonomy’s shareholders to buy into the deal. It pushed the deadline out to October 3. It only has 41.6% but, according to conventional wisdom, having that much this early in the game is an unusually high response rate.

HP went to the bond market this week for $4.6 billion worth of relatively cheap money to help pay for Autonomy but because Moody’s has decided HP’s not a prime risk anymore it’s paying double what, say, IBM would.

There’s a story going round that Léo wanted to spin out the PC unit to cover the Autonomy bill otherwise HP would be overextended because of its buyback pledges.

Forbes suggested the HP and Autonomy might build a “search engine for everything” together.

The news, which Bloomberg broke early Thursday afternoon, hit a few hours before HP was to report another drab quarter and make worse projections.

Presumably the company suffered another one of its signature boardroom leaks. The only thing the tipsters missed is the fact that HP is shutting down its short-lived webOS operation.

With the secret no longer a secret, Autonomy confirmed ahead of any word from HP that “it is in discussion” with HP “regarding a possible offer for the company.” HP said the same thing a short while later when it up and pre-announced its fiscal Q3 results and took down guidance. Apparently in the hour or so it took for Wall Street to close they sewed up the deal, even CNBC didn’t realize it an hour after. Given HP’s track record with acquisitions Autonomy gets points for guts.

HP said its plans for PCs are unsettled. While the board has “authorized the exploration of strategic alternatives for its Personal Systems Group (PSG),” the company is forging ahead and shutting down TouchPad and webOS phones and whatever other webOS devices it’s got in the works.

The company said it “will consider a broad range of options” for the PC group, including “a full or partial separation of PSG from HP through a spin-off or other transaction.” Meanwhile, it will “continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.”

HP paid $1.2 billion last year for Palm, which brought it webOS. Goodness knows what it has put in the place since then

Word started filtering back from the channel in the last few days that the vaunted TouchPad, out only since July 1, wasn’t selling.

According to the AllThingsD blog, Best Buy is sitting there with 240,000 unsold TouchPads on its hands after moving just 25,000 of the widgets and although HP cut the price by a hundred bucks the chain store reportedly wants a reluctant HP to take the dingus back.

Apparently the story is the same at Wal-Mart, Fry’s and Microcenter.

Things are at such a state that HP is now reportedly trying to find a home for webOS with the automotive and home appliance set, the Wall Street Journal said.

There was supposed to be a new 64GB TouchPad on the way with a 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor bump. Currently the 16GB and 32GB TouchPads use Qualcomm’s 1.2GHz chip.

HP said it sold $226 million worth of Palm widgetry and lost $322 million. It figured the red ink was only going to get worse this quarter and, spooked by Googlola, management lost its nerve. It was starring at potentially years worth of losses so instead HP will be taking a billion-dollar charge next quarter and maybe license the software.

HP CEO Leo Apotheker, who kindly put continues to seem all thumbs, said a few months after he arrived at the company in November that he would like HP to be deeper into enterprise software, which has never been a big seller for the company. Of course he came from SAP and is probably uncomfortable with low-margin PC hardware, especially when demand is dodgy, although the company described the PC unit as “core” only five months ago.

Rumors of a spin-off have been whispered on and off for months. HP is the largest PC supplier in the world and the unit accounts for a third of its revenue. With the company uncommitted to its PCs it’s unclear if consumers and corporates will continue to buy them through the 12-18 months it’s likely to take to dispose of the still-profitable business. Leo is apparently scared of the “tablet effect.” Still, HP could wind up doing nothing and then what.

At the same time, Apotheker said Thursday that HP was “fully committed” to the Itanium chip in its high-end proprietary servers though the company said Oracle’s decision not to continue to support the thing has resulted in canceled orders. It is suing to force Oracle to continue to produce software for the Itanium, which Oracle claims is end-of-life.

HP’s stock, depressed since Mark Hurd left the company under a cloud a year ago and worse under the investor-unloved Apotheker administration, spiked slightly on the Bloomberg report then fell again during a complete wretched day on Wall Street. Apotheker, who has even missed his own guidance, is under increasing pressure to improve the company’s performance, causing some observers to view his current plans as “gotta do something.”

Investors aren’t going to be any more pleased with HP fiscal Q3 results than they were its previous three quarters. HP’s earnings beat the Street by a penny at $1.10 a share but at $31.2 billion revenues just met consensus.

This quarter HP is now projecting revenues of $32.1 billion-$32.5 billion against estimates of $34 billion and an EPS of $1.12 to $1.16 compared to estimates of $1.31.

Leo cut its guidance for full-year FY11 revenue from $129 billion-$130 billion to $127.2 billion-$127.6 billion and said EPS would be in the range of $3.59-$3.70, not at least $4.27.

CFO Cathie Lesjack described it as “a tough outlook particularly for me as CFO.”

PCs were down 4%. Consumers were down. Enterprise servers and storage were up 7%. Networking was up 17%. Asia-Pacific was up, the US and EMEA were down. The pubic sector is a problem. Printing was down 1%.

Autonomy, whose stock closed at $25.80 in New York on Wednesday, did $859.9 million last year, up 18%, about 70% of its revenues derived from the American side of the pond. It earned $214.7 million, up 13.8%.

The 15-year-old company, which is moving to SaaS, organizes unstructured data from e-mail, web pages, presentations, business applications, voice, video and other sources not usually stored in databases. The data can then be reused for CRM, BI and document management.

IDC recently recognized Autonomy as having the largest market share and fastest growth in the worldwide search and discovery market. Whether it’s worth $10 billion and change will likely become another issue.

Its customer base includes 25,000 multinationals, law firms and federal agencies such as the BBC, Bloomberg, Boeing, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Daimler, Deutsche Bank, Ericsson, FedEx, Ford, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyds TSB, NASA, Nestle, the New York Stock Exchange, Reuters, Shell, Tesco, T-Mobile, the US Department of Homeland Security and the SEC. It says it is also OEMed by 400 companies including Symantec, Citrix, HP, Novell, Oracle, Sybase and Tibco.

Apotheker apparently feels it’s a good mate for Vertica Systems, the Michael Stonebreaker analytics database management software company HP acquired in March and will create the “next-generation information platform.”

The Autonomy acquisition, HP’s third-largest, is supposed to close by the end of the calendar year and be accretive to earnings year one. Autonomy is supposed to remain free-standing.

Apotheker packages the changes he’s making as “transformative” made in the name of “long-term shareholder value.”

HP said ex-IBMer John Visentin, lately head of corporate services for the Americas, will be the new head of its Enterprise Services unit, another guy reporting to Apotheker, and a member of its executive council. He replaces Tom Iannoti, who retired.

Frank Quattrone’s Qatalyst advised Autonomy giving it two outsized deals in one week. It also advised Motorola Mobility.

Having left its party manners at home it told everybody who would listen that Cisco is the master of complexity, high prices and that dirtiest word of all, lock-in.

“Single-vendor, proprietary approaches such as Cisco’s lock in customers while driving up cost and complexity with different architectures required at each point in the network, including data center, campus and branch. This lack of convergence and increased complexity make it difficult to roll out new applications and services.”

Naturally it’s got an alternative – a just-announced FlexNetwork architecture that it expects to eat Cisco’s lunch.

It’s an ideal time for HP to move while Cisco, its market leadership under pressure and its investor base fleeing, is distracted by restructuring and cost cutting.

Anyway, HP’s single architecture approach is supposed to unify network silos across the data center, campus and branch bringing consistency and performance to what is otherwise “disjointed” and making it easier for users to leverage chi-chi technologies like cloud computing, virtualization, mobility and media-rich content.

It’s supposed to do wonders future-proofing legacy networks, where it claims there’s been little innovation in the last 10 years.

A core component of HP’s vaunted Converged Infrastructure, the widgetry is based on modular building blocks – so it can be incrementally introduced – and open industry standards like OSPF v2 and v3, HP preens, as opposed to Cisco’s stash of patented gotchas like its EIGRP protocol.

FlexNetwork consists of:

* FlexFabric, which converges network, compute and storage across virtual and physical environments in the name of hybrid cloud computing;
* FlexCampus, which converges wired and wireless networks to deliver identity-based access to multimedia content;
* FlexBranch, which converges network functionality, security and services at the branch;
* And riding herd on the others FlexManagement, which converges network infrastructure management and orchestration.

HP toted up the number and says that by itself its single-pane-of-glass management tool does what it takes Cisco 30 different tools to do. Its latest Intelligent Management Center (IMC) 5 widgetry manages HP’s entire networking portfolio as well as more than 2,600 network devices from over 35 vendors, more than 1,000 of which are Cisco’s.

It claims it manages Cisco better than Cisco manages itself.

The stuff automatically discovers virtual machines and virtual switches and their relationship to the physical network. HP means to add automatic synchronization of network connectivity information with its Virtual Connect technology for server blades and automate the process of creating a server profile further, moving a step closer to one-button cloud provisioning.

And since the exercise is all about dumping on Cisco, HP trotted out a new A-series 10500 campus core switch for delivering media-rich applications – HP paints campus architectures as the forgotten man in other people’s schema – that are supposed to offer 75% lower latency, 250% more switching capacity and 270% more 10GbE density than Cisco’s Catalyst 6509.

The thing can be virtualized into a super core with 208 wire-speed 10GbE ports for large campuses.

Mind you the campus switch segment is supposed to be the largest segment of the worldwide Ethernet switch market, forecast to reach $13.7 billion this year up from $12 billion last year.

For the access layer of the FlexCampus HP’s got new line cards for HP E5400 and E8200 switches that are supposed deliver up to 90% lower latency, 600% higher throughput, 128% more port density and 35% less energy consumption than the Cisco’s Catalyst 4506.

On the security side – where legacy solutions sometimes only protect physical environments supporting single workloads – HP’s got a new Tipping Point S6100N Intrusion Protection appliance that propagates standard security policies across a data center, campus, branch and WAN and is supposed to automatically build in protection as virtual machines are created or moved across an enterprise.

It’s a single solution for physical, virtual and cloud environments that reportedly offers 60% higher performance than the previous generation and can inspect up to 16 Gbps of high-bandwidth application traffic in real-time to improve the availability of mission-critical services.

It’s supposed to have 100% greater performance than Cisco’s 4270 at 33% less power and reportedly discovered 309 vulnerabilities to Cisco’s one. (Ouch!)

The appliance is available now for $209,995.The A10500 switch should be available in the second half at prices starting at $38,000. IMC 5.0 is due next month for $6,995; IMC 5.1 should be available by the end of the year.

By the way, HP’s waving around a study that says that 75% of 90 Cisco resellers that account for $5 billion in revenue acknowledge that HP is part of the sales discussion and that 29% of them find HP influencing the terms of the deals.

He’s the first member of HP’s top echelon to bolt since the new administration took over in November.

Léo’s answer to this apparent dilemma was to name Jan Zadak, a Swiss who’s been managing director of HP EMEA, to replace Hogan effective May 1. Hogan’s last day will be May 31 “to ensure a smooth transition” but that doesn’t mean he’s showing up at the office.

Zadak may have something of a steep learning curve since his heritage is Compaq PCs and he doesn’t know the American market, where HP does more direct business than it does in EMEA. EMEA taps more of the channel for the cheaper selling cost.

Gossip says that Hogan, an ex-IBMer, was frustrated with Apotheker’s inability to understand that HP is primarily a people-intensive hardware company with a supply chain, not a software company.

Hogan was supposed to be “transforming” HP’s enterprise sales to make it easier to do business with a company that has a bunch of units pitching accounts.

Reportedly he doesn’t have another job, but it shouldn’t take that long.

Hogan joined HP in 2006 after Mark Hurd got there and according to the company “drove a significant extension of the company’s software portfolio, tripling revenues and expanding operating results.” Between IBM and HP, Hogan was CEO of Vignette.

Apotheker’s “evolutionary” strategy so-called was encased in a thicket of buzzwords under the banner “Everyone On,” heralding HP as the platform for connectivity and the cloud. Details were pretty thin on the ground and although he said, “It’s the first time HP is trying to put all of the elements of what it’s doing together,” the rhetoric seemed to be missing the cohesive glue as well as the how it happens. Makes one recall Lou Gerstner refusing to saddle IBM with a vision.

Anyway, although late to the party – and picking a fight with any number of folk – HP is going to go into the IaaS and PaaS public, private and hybrid cloud business with its own cloud platform – based on technology and tools whose exact origin is unclear – reportedly overriding internal suggestions that it use a budding open source platform like OpenStack.

Aside from offering storage as a service and compute as a service, the tad obvious scheme, whose timing is this year or next, will include some kind of App Market selling software HP builds or acquires or allows in that’s supposed to serve consumers, SMBs and the enterprise.

Naturally the new cloud stack will be integrated with HP’s servers, storage and networking – presumably making its hardware less desirable as the basis of other people’s clouds, which is where HP has been selling. Apotheker is depending on gentlemanly “coopetition” to pull that particular piece of fat from the fire. “We will continue to be a good partner to all our existing partners.” Like Cisco?

Oh, yeah, there’s a personal cloud in the mix somewhere too but it wasn’t teased out.

HP believes the cloud opportunity will be about $143 billion by 2013.

The connectivity is supposed to be supplied by HP’s Palm-derived webOS, which it means to install on all its PCs on top of Windows, on its printers, on sensors and set-top boxes, and on what few mobile devices it has. It also appears fated to be installed on HP servers although that factoid was more implicit than explicit.

The company figures this outrageously scaled stateless phone operating system will be on a 100 million widgets a year in no time. First, you gotta wonder whether this is gonna work and then you have to consider the lock-in if it does.

Although Léo thinks it won’t, installing webOS everywhere should tick off Microsoft, if not now eventually, but for the time being HP’s still missing the crucial smartphone and tablets needed for any ecosystem to appeal to developers. Still, it’s looking for 30,000 apps by the end of the year.

Apotheker has evidently taken a big bite of the “consumerization of the enterprise” brownie, and figures that’s the way innovation works these days. He’s counting on business buying his webOS TouchPad, which is rumored to start at $499, same as the iPad 2, and should appear on the market in June.

He also means to compete with IBM on analytics. HP is in the process of buying Vertica; IBM has bought practically everything else. According to Apotheker “Analytics is a huge space that is poorly served today.” It’s doubtful IBM is losing any sleep over HP’s intentions to deliver analytics in a year or so on-premise, in appliances and as an SaaS service. Among other things, Vertica will be made into a Big Data appliance.

IBM probably had a good chuckle over Apotheker’s claim that “We are not playing catch-up to anyone, particularly IBM” in analytics.

Disappointing a lot of the Wall Street consolidation players, Apotheker said HP will avoid big transactional applications and won’t buy any legacy software. It’s only interested in stuff that’s distributed and cloud-ified and will be “disciplined” albeit “aggressive” in making acquisitions (no more overpriced 3PARs?). Presumably it’ll be in the market for analytics. Apotheker also indicated he’s interested in security and management.

One might expect the relationship between HP and SAP, where Apotheker was briefly CEO, to tighten up (think ERP and the App Market) but no wedding bells are likely.

Lip service was paid to R&D (more spending) and services (more salesmen).

After downgrading HP’s Q2 and full-year guidance last quarter, Apotheker said this time through that the company could do $7 a share by fiscal 2014, up from $4.58 last year. It’s probably doable with some margin expansion but that doesn’t seem to cover the cost of Léo’s vision.

Goldman Sachs observed that “To shift its portfolio towards higher-growth and higher-margin segments, HP will have to take share from category leaders such as Apple, IBM, Oracle and Cisco. This will take opex investment, and gross margins are likely to be volatile as well. As such, HP’s expectation for persistent operating margin expansion and growth appears overly optimistic.”

He’s also got to pay for the dividend increases, his anti-Mark Hurd no-cost-cutting policy and the raises he restored when he arrived in an attempt to be popular with the staff.

The move finally came Thursday after the stock market closed only to be stepped on by Google’s news that it was moving one of its young founders into the CEO’s chair.

According to HP’s non-executive chairman Ray Lane four directors when asked volunteered to withdraw: Joel Hyatt, John Joyce, Robert Ryan (the board’s former lead independent director) and Lucille Salhany – that looks like at least two maybe three vocal Hurd supporters and an anti-Hurd agitator – people who, by the way, also decided to bring in Léo Apotheker as Hurd’s replacement, an unpopular, unproven dark horse choice to say the least.

In their place HP – apparently Lane who appears to be running the board – recruited five replacements: former eBay CEO and last season’s failed gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman; former Alcatel-Lucent CEO Pat Russo; former GE CIO Gary Reiner, now also a special advisor to private equity house General Atlantic; Booz & Company CEO Shumeet Banerji; and AXA Private Equity founder and CEO Dominique Senequier.

That brings the board to 13 effective January 21 ahead of election – and heavy on VCs – and their job Lane told CNBC is to support Apotheker (which sounds like the kind of yes-man thinking that gets companies into trouble). Banerji and Senequier, he said, bring international experience; Reiner can represent the enterprise customer; Whitman supposedly knows the consumer like eBay is the consurmer, and Russo networking.

So much for rearranging the furniture at that end of the building.

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal said Apotheker has been working on a plan with the HP board – which we imagine really means Lane, the one-time president of Oracle and still a managing partner at Kleiner Perkins – with maybe Marc Andreessen kibitzing – that would see HP put more emphasis on software, networking and storage (no surprise there), focus on selling into the cloud (isn’t everybody), increase HP’s R&D spend (his predecessor was criticized for cutting back), downplay PCs and servers, kick three-time-CEO-hopeful Ann Livermore, who runs HP’s $57 billion enterprise business, upstairs as vice-chairman (apparently it was wrong there), and carve her unit in two giving equipment to EMC import David Donatelli and services to Enterprise sales chief Tom Hogan both reporting to Apotheker.

The paper said the plan could change and HP denied it was going to reshuffle senior staff.

What we hear is that senior management hasn’t a clue what going on.

The next senior executive to depart, the Journal predicts, will be CIO Randy Mott.

The company has – and this is confirmed – quietly hired Emil Sayegh out of Rackspace as marketing VP, cloud computing. He was general manager of Rackspace’s Cloud Computing Division.

The plan, whatever it is, is supposed to be made public in March. Reportedly Apotheker is importing a lot of SAP people.

Oracle needs to find market share somewhere because both Sun, and Unix in general, are losing out badly according to the latest server figures from Gartner.

So Oracle’s completely refreshed it Sparc server line – which everybody wondered whether it would actually do – and, as a result, based on a new TPC-C benchmark, it’s comparing its OLTP performance to a cheetah, IBM’s to a stallion and HP’s to a turtle.

Oracle was reportedly able to achieve a record 30 million transactions a minute on a newfangled soup-up Sparc Supercluster made up of 108 T3 Sparc processors with 1,728 cores, 13TB of main memory, 1.7PT of storage, 246TB of Flash memory and a 40 gigabit network running a standard Oracle database with a quadrillion rows.

The best HP has been able to muster is a real estate- and energy-hogging Superdome that scored four million transactions a minute a few months ago. IBM, which Larry allowed – my, my – has “good products,” can do 10 million with a special non-standard clustered version of DB2 running on a Power 7 machine, Ellison said. Oracle used a plain vanilla Oracle RAC database to set the new world’s record.

Of course this is all benchmark craft. Oracle doesn’t expect anybody to actually buy the benchmark machine that’s supposed to be capable of 43 trillion transactions a day but next year Oracle will be peddling three dumbed-down general-purpose commercial versions of these new Sparc Superclusters based on Sparc T3 and M5000 servers under a new so-called “Sun Rises” program.

The Superclusters, whose price is unclear, is a complete infrastructure solution for running Oracle RAC database environments. Besides servers, they include software like ZFS, InfiniBand networking, FlashFire storage and new Gold-level support.

Ellison claimed they have no single point of failure and are completely fault-tolerant. T3 chips can have up to 16 cores. T4 chips are reportedly running in Oracle’s labs.

Oracle also introduced a new Solaris 11 Express-running blades-based Exalogic Elastic Cloud box as an alternative to the x86 Exologic Elastic Cloud machine it wheeled a few weeks ago.

The widget, to be delivered in Q1 running with Solaris or Oracle Linux, is supposed to be good at running middleware like Oracle WebLogic Server and is advertised as the “fastest Java machine in the world.” (Larry quickly pointed out that all Oracle Fusions apps are pure Java.) It also runs non-Java apps and is supposed to be optimized for multi-threaded programs.

Ellison said it’s “not a born-again cloud” whatever that means.

It offers on-demand capacity and multi-tenancy, scales and when the job is done returns the resources to the pool. It’s targeted at enterprise-wide data center consolidation and consists of a rack of 1U machines with dual six-core processors, solid-state drives and an InfiniBand I/O fabric, as might be expected since Oracle is partial to InfiniBand.

Oracle also announced a new high-end Sparc Enterprise M-Server server line bearing a new 3GHz Sparc64 VII+ processor from Fujitsu with a maximum 12MB of L2 cache, double what’s been available, offering a reported 20% performance increase. The boxes, up to the 64-socket M9000, are jointly designed, manufactured and branded.