John Furrier and Dave Vellante recapped the second day of HP Discover 2012, held this week in Frankfurt, Germany, in their latest Cube session (full video below).

Day one was all about cloud, security and big data, and day two was not all that different. But while the emphasis on cloud remained, Hewlett-Packard also launched new consumer devices and had several storage and software-defined networking announcements too.

Vellante thinks that HP hasn’t had enough time to figure out its cloud strategy yet, but Furrier says that they’re on their way. His angle is that the vendor has not been stalling, but rather laying the groundwork  for the cloud in its ecosystem.

Furrier notes that Hewlett-Packard runs massive global operation, and it had to open up its portfolio and various business units to the opportunities that lie in new technologies before actually making a move for it. The company took a step back to take two forward.

With that, he emphasizes that the market is evolving faster than ever. Vendors are transitioning from making best-of-breed products to producing transformational solutions, and that translates into a lot of industry-wide growth.

Furrier points out a couple of things that stood out for him amidst all this action. One is the fact HP is taking a standardized architecture approach akin to that of Intel’s x86 data center policy: the vendor understands that different workloads necessitate different platforms, but that is not stopping it from bolting on complimentary features.

The ball passes to Vellante, who discusses the competition. He says that HP is streamlining its portfolio, namely the three main growth areas of primary storage, backup and archiving, to play catch-up with EMC.  But in order to become a real threat to rivals, HP’s going to have to bolster its assets with acquisitions and homegrown innovation from HP Labs.