HP has been a hodgepodge of mixed signals, crossed strategies and flat ideas over the past couple years, especially in regards to webOS. Tony Rizzo, editor in chief of Mobile Enterprise, however, sees a light at the end of the tunnel for HP, and says it’s not time to give up on it yet. Republished with permission.

When Hewlett-Packard’s former CEO, Leo Apotheker signed on with HP many of us believed he would make the significant mistake of trying to turn HP into another SAP. Early on it seemed HP might avoid this trap. When the company announced – in great detail – its WebOS-based mobility strategy, its tablet, and its new smartphones, it gave some of us hope that HP was moving in the right direction to become an enteprise mobility force.

Let’s face it – mobility is the technology that matters most in today’s enterprise world. Sure, virtualization and cloud-based computing run side by side with mobility, but with the “BYOD Movement” and the general ongoing consumerization of enterprise technology still raging forward, it is mobility that matters most. At the time of its big WebOS announcements HP looked to have enterprise mobility in hand.

Then many of us were shaken to the core when HP’s former CEO decided to acquire Autonomy, decided to sell its global PC business…and essentially did away with everything and anything having to do with mobility. We had to step back and wonder if HP had a clue about where enterprises were headed. And our worst fear – that HP was going to be turned into another SAP – began to look very real.

Let’s fast forward to today. Meg Whitman is now at the helm, the PC business is going to stay in-house, and although HP will greatly overpay for Autonomy, in the long run it will eventually recoup that investment. That isn’t enough, however, to bring the trust back – especially the trust we need to have that we can rely on HP to do the right things for the enterprise from a mobile perspective.

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