It is never pleasant to watch a bond between two loved ones break apart. But judging by some of the statements made by HP executives at the company's summit in San Francisco this week, the HP and Microsoft's relationship could be on the rocks.
It might not be a separation yet, but HP seems to be banishing Microsoft to sleep on the sofa at least.
Leo Apotheker, HP's chief executive (CEO), knows he needs to act fast to make HP a strategic partner for business IT in the way that enterprises view rivals such as Accenture and IBM.
His firm might now be the largest IT company in the world and the only one offering the full gamut of products and services, from smartphones to supercomputers. Yet much of what HP provides, Apotheker admits, is commoditised or competes primarily on price.
Businesses have plenty of choices for low-cost x86 hardware, including vendors such as Dell and Lenovo. Despite HP's purchase of EDS, analysts claimed it had failed to break through into the top level of business IT services and strategic consulting. EDS remained primarily a "body shop" providing outsourced IT services.
Apotheker will also need to boost HP's services and consulting arms, but he is setting out to differentiate the company in other ways. As the former CEO of SAP, it will surprise few observers if Apotheker increased investments in software.
That, according to Quocirca analyst Clive Longbottom, needs to go beyond "tools" such as Openview, and at least into middleware.
Apotheker must be looking at Oracle's strategy of offering the entire IT "stack" at least in the data centre following its integration of Sun Microsystems, as well as the way IBM integrates its Lotus, Tivoli and DB2 software into its enterprise projects.
At the HP Summit, he also stressed the importance of the cloud. HP will increasingly provide IT services directly to its customers via cloud computing offerings, Longbottom predicted. It has consolidated its own internal data centres and might now start to repurpose or even build data centres to host customers' applications.
The other area stressed by Apotheker was WebOS, the operating system HP acquired with Palm. WebOS tablets were on display in San Francisco, as was the mobile operating system running on PCs under emulation. Industry observers expect HP to develop an x86 native version of WebOS in the near future. There was also talk of WebOS for embedded devices.
The development of WebOS and cloud computing puts HP in direct competition with Microsoft. With Azure in the cloud, Windows Phone 7 in the mobile space and Windows 7 and CE, the fight is on, although Microsoft is unlikely to be happy with this loss of HP's affections.
In some ways, of course, HP and Microsoft has always been a marriage of convenience. There are plenty of engineers in HP who would rather be developing Unix systems than supporting Windows.
But if HP and Microsoft do drift apart, it will make for some difficult decisions for enterprises, around both personal computing and cloud architectures. HP and Microsoft's options may not be compatible and CIOs could find themselves forced to choose which friend to side with.
Stephen Pritchard is a contributing editor at IT PRO.
