Mark Hurd charmed and dazzled 250 of the world’s analysts at the HP analyst gathering in Boston this week. In 2007, HP will overtake IBM as the world’s largest technology company (in terms of the last 4 quarter’s revenues, it already has) and it’s probably Mark Hurd’s fault.Hurd painted a real-time statistical picture of HP’s size. It currently sells 3 printers per second, 2 PCs per second, a server every 11 seconds and it fields 25 support calls per second. With a revenue run rate of about $90 billion is has, like IBM, about 8 percent of the $1.1 trillion market for IT products and services. But unlike IBM, it has grown its revenues by $12 billion in two years - roughly the length of time that Mark Hurd has been at the helm.

In the process of adding $12 billion to the run rate, HP has become the largest PC vendor, the largest server vendor, the 6th largest software vendor and the 4th largest services company. It’s all very impressive. In darker times it looked to me as though HP was trapped in a pincer movement by Dell at the commodity edge of the market and IBM at the high end. Dell, with efficient manufacture coded into its DNA, was feeding on HP’s PC and small server business market, while IBM with a resurgent mainframe, its powerful software portfolio and massive services business was gradually squeezing HP in high-end computing.

In the past two years the flow has reversed dramatically in both these areas, but from Hurd’s perspective, the transformation of HP to IT uber-competitor and industry leader is not over by a long way. He confesses this with the air of a man that means business.

Internally HP is, as they say, “eating its own dog food” - in fact it is feasting on it - so it can demonstrate its capabilities using itself as the case study. On Hurd’s arrival, HP’s internal IT involved 5000 applications running on 23,000 servers (including 700 data marts) spread across 87 data centers. This sprawling set of IT assets is in the process of being reduced to a smaller number of applications spanning 14,000 servers with a single data warehouse (plus virtual data marts) spanning far fewer locations. HP’s economic approach to power utilization and cooling is demonstrated by the fact that this IT infrastructure transformation is being accompanied by an increase of 80% in aggregate CPU power and a 50% decline in electricity costs.

HP now seems more coherent that it has been in two decades and there’s clear room for significant growth in its software and its services business. It will surely continue to grow. It has become a mean competitor and, from where I’m standing, it now looks like the dominant IT vendor.