6. HP drinks its own champagne. At the Technology Forum & Expo, which also was held in Las Vegas this week, the company detailed how it used its own hardware, software and services to consolidate more than 85 data centers into six; cut servers by 40 per cent while increasing processing power by 250 per cent; and double storage capacity for less cost. The experience is teaching HP about its products, Hurd said, which ultimately will help customers.

"It's not just using the software, it's stressing it. We want to find the holes to make sure what we tell you works actually works," Hurd said. "I can tell you upfront there are holes and everything can't be virtualized."

7. HP views the success of the pending US$13.9 billion acquisition of EDS as dependent on its software unit. The pending buy, Hurd said, will help HP expand its services business more quickly, but not without putting standardized processes in place and coupling HP automation software with an updated services business.

"Clearly we are going to get more scale, more capabilities and be able to execute vertically, and we will clearly try to leverage the agnostic nature of HP services' outsourcing business," Hurd said. "We will not only align our software with our services, we will embed it into the service-delivery processes we use."

8. The company acknowledged its shortcomings in customer support since the Mercury acquisition closed. While HP had committed 1,000 consultants in a software-support capacity, Hogan admitted -- amid much applause during a keynote address -- that HP needs to get better at supporting all its customers using organic or acquired HP software.

"We dropped the ball particularly with ex-Mercury customers," Hogan said. "We will not rest until we have the best support in the business."

9. HP is committed to IT service-management best practices. The vendor co-authored ITIL Version 3 and incorporated the processes into such products as Release Control 4.0. In addition, Configuration Management Systems couples HP automation technology acquired with Opsware with standardized approaches to change- and configuration-management.

"IT process automation and [configuration-management-database] technologies go hand in hand; the two need each other to evolve," said Dennis Drogseth, research vice president at Enterprise Management Associates. "By using best practices and offering a cohesive way to manage change, customers can more aggressively automate processes."

10. HP touted its software-as-a-service delivery model, which offers HP software hosted and managed by HP to customers on a subscription basis. The vendor started the program about eight years ago, and is the sole software-as-a-service provider among the Big Four management vendors. Such products as SaaS for Service Manager and SaaS for Application Security offer customers a low entry price into using HP's resources that include 80 public points of presence to stress and performance-test applications from external locations.

"SaaS offers us flexibility and frees up IT resources on projects I don't have time to spend planning or implementing," says Don Jackson, engineer at Cardinal Health in Dublin, Ohio, who also licenses HP software products. "We decided that for certain tasks we don't do enough work there to warrant an investment in staff or infrastructure resources, and the SaaS model enables us to get the work done using 10 per cent of the time it would take a full-time administrator to do it."