HP's Mark Hurd: More content is fantastic for us

HP CEO Mark Hurd took a turn at Oracle OpenWorld, responding to a series of video questions from attendees. The engaging Hurd was ready for softballs, including whether one should buy a Dell or HP PC and whether he beats Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at tennis.

Hurd was most animated when talking about content. "We at HP love that the ecosystem of content is continuing to explode. In fact, more content is fantastic for us, and in fact the desire to have content global is also great for us. The fact that a farmer in China wants to access the same content as a doctor in Chicago is a fantastic IT opportunity for us," he said.

He went on to tout the opportunity to provide infrastructure modernization in places like Eastern Europe, where only 25 percent of homes have landlines. "The ecosystem of infrastructure that has to support the ecosystem of content is a huge opportunity for us," he said. "The more real-time and more time sensitive, the more the infrastructure ecosystem has to respond to the market opportunity." (See a video of his remarks on the content ecosystem.

He also noted the generation impact on organizations. The new workforce expects to get information rapidly, which is an issue for businesses. "The tolerance for our traditional business response is pretty close to zero," Hurd said. "The problem won't get easier. As the data inclines, customers get less patient."

In addition, the data expansion form open social networks and other sources bring up security issues, which can also be good for HP's infrastructure business. Hurd said the Wikipedia has his birth date wrong. "I am actually massively younger," he quipped. "All of the content has to get rationalized, people are begging for it."

In light of IBM acquiring business intelligence maker Cognos, Hurd said the one of HP's core objectives is to provide the "best information on the planet" to help serve customers. "We used to have 700 datamarts to get the wrong answer, and we are working to fix that," he said. HP receives 800 millon consumer incidents (phone calls, Web queries) per year, and averages 4.5 min per phone call, he said, as an example of how his company is improving the customer experience and saving costs.

For the crowd of OpenWorld attendees he stated his view of the root of successful IT implementations. Great use of IT starts with him, the CEO, he said, supported by process and only then by technology. Nonetheless, HP, IBM, Sun, Oracle, SAP and a host of others will be fighting for the chance to deliver the technology to customers.