Side-stepping the spying scandal that has engulfed the company over the past fortnight, HP chief executive Mark Hurd and fellow executives last week outlined ambitions to be at the heart of datacentre re-engineering.

In a speech at the HP Technology Forum in Houston, Hurd ignored the fiasco that has seen chairman Patricia Dunn and another board member agree to leave the company, apart from quipping that he asked an HP executive throwing an honorary baseball pitch for the local Houston Astros team “not to embarrass the company” further.

Instead, Hurd and colleagues focused on the more arcane topics of server consolidation, service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and promising to spend more time talking to customers.

Specifically, HP is seeking to be the major integration partner for firms reducing server count and building new architectures based on reusable components. The IT giant announced plans to open three SOA Competency Centres, respectively in California, Singapore and Bangalore. The openings will supplement centres already in place in France and Tokyo.

Many HP users are at inflection points with their datacentre planning as they ponder moves off retired or soon-to-be-retired platforms such as the Tru64 Unix operating system, or the Alpha and PA-Risc processor architectures.

However, experts said that most users will by now have solid migration plans whether they are HP veterans or coming from Digital, Compaq or other acquired platforms.

“HP has given plenty of warning and [migration planning] has been the same story from PDP to VAX to Alpha to Itanium,” said Ian Severn, general manager of the HP User Group in the UK.

“In the same way as some firms today still have VAX systems in the corner, a few customers will see out their legacy until the machines dies, but they realise that no technology can last forever. The way forward is to move onto Itanium or something else.”

Users of the veteran HP e3000 server are still clinging onto the platform. HP currently plans to end support at the end of 2008 although rumours of a deadline extension abound and the firm said it planned to later this year make an announcement regarding authorised hardware upgrades.

On user forums, some e3000 supporters contend there remains value in extending the MPE operating system. One recent contributor, for example, suggested running the MPE file system atop Linux. Others want HP to open-source the operating system.