"One of things to think about long-term, once you evolve to a utility model, services don't actually play a part in it -- think about how many services you use to run your electric utility or your phone utility, as an end-user consumer of that. You don't, it just works." --David Scott, SVP, HP Storage, at HP Discover 2011 So maybe the traditional services business will eventually fade away. To be fair, David Scott was talking mostly about professional services, consulting specifically, when he made that very astute comment. As the former CEO of 3PAR, he's lived the cloud/utility dream for a long time, and is now seeing his persistence pay off. And certainly cloud computing will change customers' services needs radically, as it is doing already. But customers will always need services, at the very least in the form of customer support. At some point, things break, the server or the network goes down or gets hacked, and the customer's business takes a hit as a result. That's why when I think about HP Services, I think of Ann Livermore.