salesforce.com CEO to HP: "Good Call!"

Evan Niu, The Motley Fool
Updated

Hewlett-Packard (NYS: HPQ) is getting a thumbs-up from salesforce.com (NYS: CRM) CEO Marc Benioff.

Having only been at the helm for less than a year, HP CEO Leo Apotheker must welcome validation for his major shift in the company's strategy. At the Dreamforce 2011 conference in San Francisco, Benioff recently applauded HP's decision to exit the PC business and focus on enterprise software, even as HP's transformation may put it in direct competition with salesforce.com's own software offerings at some point.

Although HP has renounced smartphone and tablet hardware with a clearance sale -- and oddly continuing to build them -- it must still come up with a plan for webOS. I think HP is willing to take the loss on hardware in a risky effort to widen the installed base of webOS in order to maximize what it can sell the platform for, but that's just my Foolish opinion.

HP's IBM-esque (NYS: IBM) move is much more dramatic than Big Blue's own software company additions. The bill for HP's acquisition of Autonomy topped $10 billion. In contrast, IBM spent approximately $6 billion last year to acquire seventeen companies. That's less than two-thirds the cost and seventeen times as many companies! Just recently, IBM announced the acquisition of crime and fraud data software specialist i2 for an undisclosed amount and risk management analytics company Algorithmics for $387 million.

Both of these acquisitions tie into cross-selling additional services to financial institutions. IBM should be able to incrementally realize more value from them than HP will from Autonomy. After all, the first step to getting good value is not paying a huge premium.

What do you think? Will HP be able to transform itself into a software powerhouse while rejecting its hardware roots? Share your thoughts in the comments box below.

At the time thisarticle was published Fool contributorEvan Niuholds no position in any company mentioned.Click hereto see his holdings and a short bio. The Motley Fool owns shares of IBM.Motley Fool newsletter serviceshave recommended buying shares of and also shorting salesforce.com. Try any of our Foolish newsletter servicesfree for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe thatconsidering a diverse range of insightsmakes us better investors. The Motley Fool has adisclosure policy.

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