Robert McMillan and Stacy Cowley

While this month's dismissal of former Chief Executive Officer Carly Fiorina has cast some doubt over the future of all of HP's strategic plans, its technology and services offerings for big customers, key to doing battle with archrival IBM Corp., are likely to come under special scrutiny. Soon after IBM debuted its "on demand" computing vision in late 2002, Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) joined the pack of vendors following IBM's lead and rolled out its own, similar strategy for helping its customers build more agile and flexible technology infrastructures.