In a chilly Hamburg last December, HP Software offered both good and bad news to the thousands of delegates at its annual Software Universe conference. The bad news, according to Jan Zadak, senior VP for enterprise business sales, is that the state of the global economy means enterprise IT spend will never be the same again. The good news is that HP has made it easier for service providers to use the cloud and for ordinary enterprises to extend and insure their own cloud infrastructure.

HP Software, now the sixth largest software company in the world, had strong orders at the beginning of Q4 after a slow Q3 but the overall trend has prompted more emphasis on agility and the cloud.