Cloud computing bringing IT industry to 'disruptive' inflection point, says HP's Meg Whitman

The systems and software 'elite' are being challenged by Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com, warns Whitman

Cost-conscious CIOs who are being forced to do more with less are driving the adoption of cloud-enabled services, according to HP CEO Meg Whitman. These changes are not just in mainstream software-as-a-service usage, but also in areas such as databases, storage, security and transactional software.

Whitman was speaking to customers at HP's Software Universe event in London. Whitman's strategy for HP is centred on three main areas that customers are most focused on: cloud computing, information optimisation and security.

"From the CIO standpoint, information technology is becoming more complex and CIOs are under a lot more pressure to do things faster and less expensively," she said.

However, change is not just being driven from outside the enterprise, but also from within it, she warned – with IT staff often establishing private clouds under the CIO's radar in order to complete tasks more cheaply and efficiently.

"Groups of people have been going rogue, going off and setting up their own little clouds to get stuff done within their organisation," said Whitman.

This creates a management challenge for CIOs, she said – and a technology challenge for vendors.

"The question is, how do you orchestrate the information flow between these vertical stacks and capabilities? How do you monitor and automate these processes? How do you move, analyse and secure your information?"

More than ever, said Whitman, vendors need to be genuinely wedded to open systems and open architectures in order to address the challenges – especially that of information management.