Fiorina re-launches HP as an infrastructure company

NEWS The e-services business has offered HP the chance to reinvent itself, Carly Fiorina, CEO at HP, admitted to the audience of its Paris ecommerce. Fiorina said: "It enabled us to focus our enterprise on radical innovation that two years ago we might have tossed aside." She claimed the launch of e-services and the publishing code of its ecommerce platform software- e-speak- on the Internet turned HP from a company with "lots of separate divisions into an infrastructure company." E-speak is the Internet software platform developed by HP Labs to enable users to request and locate services on the Net. "Two years ago few would have predicted that HP would be involved with the partners it is involved with today, such as Yahoo!, EDS and Nokia," Fiorina said. However, Jon Collins, senior analyst at Bloor, doubted whether e-services would be as successful as HP hoped. "It's not a dead horse yet, it's more like a horse stuck in the paddock waiting for its big race," he commented. "Technically it is very sound and it is a vision of the future and is very attractive, but the problem will be one of adoption. "It is a solution still looking for a cause and it could be a technology that people look at retrospectively and say it was before its time," he added.