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It's no surprise that the new-and-re-improved Hewlett-Packard has come to the conclusion this afternoon, under newly-minted President and CEO Meg Whitman, that it will not spin off the Personal Systems Group (PSG) division responsible for producing PCs and tablets. This move was announced after the close of stock trading Thursday afternoon.

But one of the first questions analysts asked during an HP investors' press conference this afternoon was the fate of its tablet unit. Today, Whitman made it absolutely clear that any tablet PCs HP may produce in the coming year will center around Windows 8, not the webOS platform that HP acquired in the Palm buyout just over one year ago.

The rate at which data, or content, is being produced for the Web and being generated for businesses has outpaced the rate at which conventional databases are evolving to better manage it all. It's a fact of life that we perceive on a gradual basis every day, but that we haven't yet acknowledged to be as significant or dangerous a trend as it is: Data is getting slower. Networks are getting bigger as the cloud is getting broader, and data that was already difficult to manage is becoming impossible. Content management systems today continue to be based on the types of structured database systems about one or two steps more evolved than dBASE. We've known they would be insufficient for the task, but we've put off the problem of composing a new architecture.

It's already too late for major IT companies to start that new architecture from square one; if a company has any hope of addressing this colossal, underappreciated problem, it will need to acquire the architectural project in progress. This is what Hewlett-Packard announced yesterday that it intends to do: acquire a software firm whose core product aims to supplant everything we know about databases, both the SQL kind and the Google kind. In its place would come a clustered approach whose goal is no less than to be the central repository for meaning in the world.

And in exchange for this, HP is willing to let go of the promise of Palm.

webOS is the heart of how HP will compete against far more established competitors in the mobile marketplace, especially in the enterprise, where it may have its best chance of success against Apple iOS and Google Android.

At the opening keynote yesterday for HP Discover, CEO Leo Apotheker said the TouchPad is designed with the enterprise in mind. It's the first serious device that HP has offered in the tablet space with features that do differentiate it from its competitors. At its core is webOS 3.0.

Today HP CEO Leo Apotheker announced HP's new strategy: cloud, connectivity and software. Mobility, consumerization of IT and big data will all play a role in this new strategy. In particular, HP's WebOS and Vertica acquisitions will drive it forward.

Here's a look at the specific plans Apotheker discussed.

Last week Hewlett-Packard announced it will be brining WebOS to PCs. In an interivew with the Seattle Times, HP CTO of Personal Systems Phil McKinney says that HP isn't ditching Windows, but will integrate WebOS with Windows. "It will be a combination of taking the existing operating systems and bringing WebOS onto those platforms and making it universal across all of our footprint," McKinney said. "It's not virtualization. It's an integrated WebOS experience we're looking to bring."

The days of enterprises choosing one smartphone vendor appear to be ending. Forrester reported last year that 60% of enterprises support employee-owned smartphones, and mixed environments are becoming the norm.

BlackBerry was still the most popular enterprise smartphone operating system as of Forrester's Q1 2010 survey. According to Good Technology's numbers, iOS is growing the fastest by far. But with more enterprise tools for Android on the market - including new tools recently released by Zenprise and the forthcoming offerings from Motorola and SAP - Android is poised for strong growth.