The IT firm is trying to put the turmoil of recent months behind it by exploring the possibilities of information management

MEG WHITMAN was under significant scrutiny when she took to the stage at the HP Discover 2011 technology conference in Vienna last week. At her first European outing as the newly appointed chief executive and president of the IT company, her primary job was to assure customers and shareholders that HP was in safe hands.

The US multinational has been in turmoil over the past three months, exhibiting the business acumen of a street-corner restaurant that keeps changing its menu in a desperate bid to attract custom. But anyone expecting a mission statement and insights into where HP was heading under Whitman would have been disappointed. She made it clear it was too soon to offer up a big vision, reminding us that she had only been in the job nine weeks, one day and 20 hours.

“I want to get the HP drama out of the headlines and our fabulous products and services into the headlines,” she said. “And get back to being the reliable, trusted, steady partner that you can count on, day in and day out.”

Her main agenda was to convey stability and regain the confidence that was severely rattled when the previous chief executive, Léo Apotheker, announced plans to discontinue the company’s market-leading personal computer range. That decision has since been reversed and Whitman took time to reassert HP’s core business values, much of it based on hardware and infrastructure, complete with a couple of case studies. It was very safe and a little dull.

After a career that included a stint at Procter Gamble, Whitman made her name as the chief executive of eBay, taking the start-up from 30 to 15,000 employees and to billion-dollar revenues. There have been a few career blips since, including an unsuccessful campaign to become governor of California, leaving some commentators to question her credentials for running what is still predominantly a hardware company.

But Whitman has another spin on it, harking back to her eBay days. “I have walked in your shoes and was a huge buyer of technology,” she told delegates at the convention. “For the first time in a long time the CEO of HP was once a customer of HP.”

She went on to put the record straight on some high-profile software acquisitions, taking a pot shot at Apotheker while reinforcing core HP products and services.

“We are not in the software business to transform HP into a software company; we are in the software business to help you solve your most challenging problems,” she said.

Ironically, the most interesting announcements in Vienna involved software and could be traced back to Apotheker. Though he took the bullet for a string of bad financial results and the confusion over the future of the PC division, he was also the architect of the Autonomy Corporation acquisition.

Buying the British company for €8.2 billion raised a few eyebrows, but HP used Vienna to showcase a plan that also involves Vertica, a database analytics company HP bought in March. HP is building an information management portfolio that looks genuinely innovative and significant in an era of “me too” IT services.

Mike Lynch, the Irish-born founder of Autonomy, explained the pieces of the jigsaw that HP had assembled. Back in the 1990s, he identified that information management was going to become a major challenge and built his start-up on the back of analysing unstructured data. Businesses use databases to access and control structured data, but “customers don’t live their lives in rows and columns”, said Lynch. They use human-friendly information, the 85 per cent of information that remains unstructured – video, audio, text and a new wave of social media.

Human-friendly data is where a lot of the interesting things happen, according to Lynch, but managing it has been impossible. “You can store audio and video in databases but you can’t understand them, it’s like having a DVD in a filing cabinet,” he explained.

“Up until now we’ve seen processes where human beings manually tag all content, but that’s not a goer in terms of the data volumes we have and the specificity of understanding. And you can look at keywords, but they are not sufficient for machines.”

Autonomy uses pattern-matching algorithms in its Idol platform to automate the contextual understanding of unstructured data. There are scenarios where this becomes important, with Lynch citing anti-fraud as one. An investment bank, for example, that wants to ensure employees are not receiving unsolicited gifts can trawl thousands of e-mails to see if anything untoward is happening.

He said the ability to search for contextual meaning rather than keywords was a milestone for the industry. “Other changes have been technology-based, around mainframes, client server and now the cloud, but this change in the type of information that IT systems have to deal with is the first time the ‘i’ in IT has changed,” he said.

In his new role as an executive vice-president at HP, Lynch is heading up an information management portfolio that he believes is a game-changer. The pitch is that the combination of Vertica’s high-speed analytics platform with Autonomy’s Idol technology marks a fundamental shift in the ability to process huge volumes of data and turn it to business advantage.

On the ground, HP’s people are busy building the capability into appliances aimed at small as well as large companies. Bolt-on business intelligence solutions and advanced statistical modelling will turn the analytics into insights for strategic planning.

Some enterprise customers, including a multinational oil and gas company, are already using a combination of Vertica and Autonomy products to support practical business tasks, automating key processes and improving organisational efficiency.

“For the first time in the history of the IT industry there is one building block that can handle 100 per cent of the information,” said Lynch.

With data doubling every 18 months and the proliferation of digital workflows, HP could well be holding the keys to the kingdom of next-generation information management – a sort of Google for businesses.

That is assuming, of course, that HP’s management doesn’t change its plans.