Meg Whitman

In a conference room filled predominantly by males in the Information Technology industry, a woman stands before the thousands of listening ears and looking eyes. This woman, Meg Whitman, has had a past of working for some of the best companies such as Proctor and Gamble, Walt Disney and Ebay. In some cases, the companies were already well established and well known but in the case of Ebay, she took the company from a smaller company making millions to now billions of dollars annually in revenue.

Meg Whitman as CEO of HP, has only been with the company for eight months, but already she has a vision of where to take the company. She told us of how HP makes a difference and this goes along with the Discover 2012 Conference’s slogan, “Make it matter.” She outlined how HP has helped the UK Ministry of Defence. Information Technology experts actually volunteer for this “mission” and put on bullet-proof vests to be in field operations with the soldiers such as they have done in Afghanistan. The purpose is to help the UK Ministry develop strategies on how better technology can serve the military. This HP difference makes them different as a corporate company and citizen.

Ms. Whitman spoke of the tectonic plates of the IT industry moving. With this in mind, she reminded the IT people that the industry needs to become more open and ubiquitous. From the cloud, to social media, to data storage, to security, to speed, to agility and to costs, these are all factors and considerations for this company.

Meg Whitman challenges the CIO to deal with the changing landscape. The market place and the current models are changing. To orchestrate the information flow and open the architectural systems, the CIO has to strategize and Meg Whitman points how HP can be the one to do this. She spoke of a four pronged attack of 1) Solutions 2) Service 3) Software and 4) Infrastructure. Meg Whitman gives another example where they helped the Bank of India over a 5 year period to return a 200% increase.

The CEO spoke of how IT is more than the sum of the parts but an aggregate of its resources. With the cloud, security and information optimization, HP can help companies capture the future. HP will help the company to pick a delivery model to help them deal with their changing needs. Meg Whitman finishes off with speaking of that in times of crisis, such as the flooding in Christchurch, the earthquake in Japan and other disasters, HP was there to help and continue to “make it matter.”