Leo Apotheker, HP's New CEO – During a Conference Call with the Media

Since Leo Apotheker's has become the new CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co. everyone is curious to ask him the same two questions, which were finally answered when the company was presenting its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings.

Oracle Corp., which is in competition to HP in the practical market, has been attempting to convinvvr him to testify at an intellectual property trial which is related to Apotheker's former employer SAP AG. According to Oracle, HP has denied any subpoena on Apotheker's behalf, whereas HP has even pointed the finger at Oracle for harassing Apotheker. However, in any case, Oracle failed to bring Apotheker at the trial, and it is now on Monday that jury expects Apotheker appearing in person, or maybe Oracle playing a recorded deposition he had given in 2008.

While in a conference call with the press media, upon inquiry of ‘where he was,’ Apotheker he laughed and referred it to be an "odd question" as he implied it was quite obvious that he was in HP's headquarters in Palo Alto. He went on, by saying, he feels like he’s setting a "world record" for travel recently as he was travelling and meeting with HP employees and customers all over the globe. Whereas he also claimed that Oracle’s quarrels were just in effort to "distract" investors and the media, he indicated in these words: "We know and we have heard over and over again these past few weeks that what really matters to our investors and employees is HP's business performance and growth.”

Whereas the second question discussed with him on the phone was quite straight-forward one. He was referred to his emphasis on enhancing HP's software position. And then inquired about his initial thoughts on whether that could be accomplished organically or through smaller acquisitions or whether HP needs to think about something more transformative here?

His answer to this question was very quotable; he replied "It's a very interesting question. It's a bit early for me to give you a precise answer. What I can say at this moment in time is we want to strengthen our software capabilities, both as a business and also as a cross-HP capability to add more value to the various activities that we undertake. We have many options available to us. We can do some of it organically, some of it non-organically, and you understand that we won't comment on any M&A activity during this call.”