You could sense the change coming last week at HP Discover. And now it’s official. David Donatelli is rising in the ranks, reporting directly to CEO Leo Apotheker, where he will continue as executive vice president for Enterprise Servers, Storage, Networking and Technology Services.

The executive change in power was announced today, following a week at HP Discover where Donatelli was one of the big stars of the show, highlighting what has come to be the story for HP. And that’s all about converging the infrastructure with a strategy that focuses on openness.

Here’s his interview with David Vellente and John Furrier on The Cube.

Also announced today was the news that Ann Livermore was stepping down from her job as the lead for HP Enterprise Services. The long time HP veteran will continue with the company, most significantly as a member of its board of directors.

Livermore’s move to the board of directors shows the respect the company has for her loyalty to the company. She has been at HP for 29 years, establishing herself as a well-respected manager who brought the business to a leading spot in the enterprise market.

Donatelli comes to his new role with considerable experience. He spent 22 years at EMC Corporation, where he held a variety of management, operations, sales and marketing positions. In his most recent role, he served as president of the EMC Storage Division, where he oversaw the development of EMC’s storage platforms as well as the company’s Information Management Software and Infrastructure Software product offerings, Global Supply Chain and Worldwide Manufacturing.

Donatelli’s focus will continue to be on enterprise, server, storage and networks. His challenge will be in continuing to chip away at Cisco in networking and a variety of competitors in the storage space that include EMC. In the meantime, HP has to make a major play in the cloud space where it has been criticized for being a bit late to the market. But it’s also important to note that HP has a history in the hosting market through its acquisition of EDS. Combine that with its data center expertise and there could be a winning combination.

But the name of the game is speed. We’ll see how HP integrates Vertica, the big data analytics company it acquired in February.

If they can pull that off then the open strategy may well work very well. People want reliability but most of all they want speed.

But Donatelli is the kind of executive who loves to aggressively move in the market. We’ll see how fast he can move over the next several months in his new, important role at HP.