Innovation is a lofty goal for many marketers, but for Hewlett-Packard, during its five-year turnaround plan, it has placed innovation at the top of its strategic goal list and it has delivered great results and positive brand loyalty.
During the company’s Nov. 25 fourth-quarter financial results conference call, Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman was very excited about the company’s position in the third year of its five-year turnaround plan.
“We’ve reignited innovation across HP, strengthened our leadership, delivered cash flow above expectations, fortified our balance sheet, and grown our non-GAAP earnings per share,” she said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “And we finally stabilized our revenue trajectory delivering flat topline revenue for the company on a constant currency basis for the full year.”
Whitman said HP delivered this excellent performance while continuing to invest in the “critical innovation that will be the foundation of HP’s future. In fiscal 2014, we increased research and development 
spending by 10% over the prior year, as we increased investment in every segment, including cloud, infrastructure, 3D Printing and of course, the machine.”
Whitman said HP has the strongest portfolio it’s had in a decade.
Earlier this year, we announced HP Helion, a portfolio of cloud products and services that enable organizations to build, manage and consume workload in hybrid IT environment. In the fourth quarter, we continued our momentum in HP Helion, with the acquisition of Eucalyptus, a provider of open source software for building private and hybrid enterprise clouds. Eucalyptus CEO, Mårten Mickos joined HP as a Senior Vice President and General Manager of our Cloud business.
We also announced HP OpenNFV, a network function virtualization technology initiative that will help communications service providers accelerate innovation and launch their services faster, more easily and with less expense.
NFV represents one of the most significant shifts in the telecom industry in 20 years and HP is very well-positioned to capitalize on this shift. With open and agile architectures, such as our software defined networking and Helion cloud technologies, we are leading the move away from monolithic purpose-built products.
In May, we announced the latest release of our HP Vertica Big Data Analytics platform, a key component of HAVEn. It allows customers to store and explore data with the most sophisticated SQL on Hadoop capabilities, combined with advanced analytics and dynamic workload management.
In June, we introduced the HP Apollo Family of high-performance computing systems, capable of delivering up to four times the performance of standard rack servers while using less space and energy. This includes the Apollo 8000, an industry first liquid-cooled supercomputer that combined high-level of processing power with ultra-low energy usage.
We also extended our Converged Storage portfolio with a solid-state optimized all-flash HP 3PAR StoreServ system. It delivers performance and low latency without compromising enterprise resiliency or adding data center complexity.
In August, we announced our new portfolio of HP ProLiant Gen9 Servers. These servers are optimized for convergence, cloud and software-defined environments, and deliver flexible, scalable computing resources that are align to customer’s business goals.
In September, we expanded our commercial PC portfolio with the launch of HP Z Desktop and ZBook mobile workstations. These powerful devices are built to address the constraints of compute intensive industries, like media and entertainment, graphic design, and oil and gas exploration.