One of the first big things HP CEO Meg Whitman did to try and turn HP around (besides laying off 29,000 people) was to clear out some of the old, archaic tech that employees were using and bring in cloud computing.
That's why HP became a Salesforce.com customer about two years ago (as well as Workday).
HP, with over 300,000 employees worldwide, was one of largest customers that Salesforce.com had ever landed at that time.
On Monday, the two companies came up with a new way to work together: a project called "Superpod."
The Superpod is HP's private area in Salesforce.com's data center where Salesforce's software will run on HP's hardware.
Salesforce.com has never done this for another customer.
Sharing the hardware and software (in geek speak "multitenancy") is what Salesforce.com is all about. Sharing is how cloud computing saves money over traditional, on-premises computing.
But HP is such a big customer that it can get it's own Superpod, Benioff told analysts in a quarterly conference call.
What's more HP will help Salesforce.com sell Superpods to other huge enterprises. Such VIP treatment will only be offered to the biggest customers, Benioff said.
We'll see if the Superpod brings more huge customers to Salesforce, or generates much new revenue to HP. It could. We still like the project's name.
HP could maybe name more of its products like that: SuperWin (a Windows 8 PC); SuperDroid (A Chromebook), SuperServ (a new server) ...
