Hewlett Packard used its Discover event in Frankfurt last week to reassert the company’s cloud credentials. Public, private, hybrid; HP is painting pictures that encompass them all, whilst seeking to protect hardware revenues and reassure conservative executives at some of its largest and most profitable customers. But HP has been here before, making bold claims and telling people what they wanted to hear about an HP cloud upon which enterprises could depend. This time, will the company deliver? Earlier this year, satirical news site The Onion took a cruel but funny swipe at HP’s cloud pretensions. HP, the sketch suggested, had the answers, the technology, and a lot of cloud. The company has done — and continues to do — a lot right in this space, but it really did bring this derision upon itself. Mixed messaging, repeated announcements of amazing new cloud services that never quite saw the light of day, an endless stream of apparent strategy U-turns that must surely have left long-time HP executives as dizzy as those trying to understand their intentions? None of this helped HP. But now, Windows Azure is apparently behind us. PalmOS (or whatever it’s called these days) is no longer a glue to […]