Meg Whitman

Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman got her chance to publicly respond to comments made last month by friend and rival John Chambers, telling an audience of CIOs that she would rather be in her current position than serving in Chambers' position as chairman and CEO of Cisco.

"I'd rather have my hand than John's hand right now," Whitman said at a question-and-answer period during her Mastermind presentation at this week's Gartner US Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Fla.

Whitman was responding to a question from Yvonne Genovese, managing vice president for analyst firm Gartner, about comments Chambers made last month in a Bloomberg article.

[Related: Chambers On The Record: How Cisco Plans To Become The No. 1 IT Company]

Genovese said Chambers a couple of weeks ago said, "She's doing this out of the kindness of her heart. And I would have told her not to. Mathematically, you have to say low odds."

However, she said, Chambers during his Tuesday Mastermind presentation at the Gartner conference corrected himself by saying, "If anybody can fix HP, it's probably Meg and [HP Executive Director] Ray Lane." At the same time, Genovese said, Chambers called Whitman a friend, and said, "But I'm in it to win it."

Politically, it sounds like Chambers was walking back on his earlier comments, Whitman replied.

"John is a dear and good friend, but in certain areas of the market we compete, and we aim to win," she said. "In the networking space, which is his core business, we now have 18 percent unit share, 11 percent [revenue] share, and we're moving fast. I think when you put 320,000 HP people against a set task, don't bet against us. So we're fierce competitors, and we'll see how it all works out in the end. I'd rather have my hand than John's hand right now."

HP, which directly competes with Cisco in the networking and server markets, has to deal with perceptions in the market that the networking and server businesses are moving toward commoditization, Whitman said.

It is a perception she is trying to refute.

NEXT: HP Innovation Fights Server, Networking Commoditization

"People say to me, 'If you are really going to focus in on hardware', and we are, among many other things, 'aren't you worried that this will be a commodities business?'" Whitman said. "Someone said to me 'zero-calorie business' the other day. And my view to that is, absolutely not."

Whitman said the demand for compute resources is absolutely not going down, but instead is rising for everyone from individuals to enterprises. "We need to come out with the most innovative, the most beautifully engineered products that can help you deliver that to your customer," she said. "And we ought to be able to stay ahead of that innovation cycle."

She cited as examples HP's new Generation 8 ProLiant servers, the introduction of which is ramping up faster than did the Generation 8 ProLiant servers, as well as HP's Project Moonshot low-power-consumption servers, which were initially launched using the ARM processor but which next year will be available with x86 processors. She also cited HP's 3PAR storage acquisition, noting that its business grew 80 percent over last year.

"And one thing John doesn't always talk about is, we are the No. 1 networking company in China," she said. "We have a 41 percent market share in China, one of the fastest-growing markets in the world. ... If we're good, and we have the best engineers in my view in the world, we should stay ahead of this curve. And I'm not worried about commoditization at all."

PUBLISHED OCT. 26, 2012