Hewlett-Packard has been making a series of significant moves to enter the software and cloud computing market, under relatively new CEO Leo Apotheker. The latest is the rumored acquisition of Tibco, an enterprise software vendor with a focus on messaging and enterprise social networking. Tibco would almost certainly bring some growth to HP’s software growth table, with very solid quarters.

“In the first quarter, Tibco reported non-GAAP earnings of 16 cents a share on revenue of $185.3 billion. For fiscal 2011, Tibco is expected to deliver net income of $156.6 million on revenue of $864.1 million.”

Tibco’s pricey share causes some analysts to maintain neutral ratings on the company, but it would represent a welcomed addition to HP. For once, Hewlett-Packard is focusing on cloud computing, and Tibco – a company built on services oriented infrastructure- focuses on real-time infrastructure including business integration, process management and optimization. This is the very market segment Tom Hogan, HP’s EVP of sales and strategy for big business noted to be a “huge” market, worth $75 billion according to HP estimates.

Hewlett-Packard has set its eyes on this market, and as a part of the company’s efforts it has announced a new line of up of products and services designed to speed up and scale enterprise applications. Some of these offerings assess, modernize and manage applications to analyze a customer’s portfolio, other minimize the risks of migration into the cloud and so on.

HP may be investing a great deal in moving beyond just hardware, but it’s not the only IT giant focusing on the cloud right now. VMware too had an announcement today, which follows the company’s launch of its first PaaS offering – Cloud Foundry. This represents an important milestone for the virtualization giant, who introduced the “new generation platform.”