Software vendors may be clamoring for a share of the burgeoning BI market, but HP is confident its ambitious plans can make a real impact against incumbent providers.

"Our goal is to provide the most scalable offering in the industry [and] because we are not the first to market we need deliver this at a fraction of the cost of existing data warehouse solutions," Hogan said.

A successful launch and uptake of NeoView will bring HP into the league of data warehouse and BI infrastructure providers like IBM Corp., Oracle and NCR Corp.'s Teradata.

According to Hogan, a big opportunity for HP's data warehousing play over the next few years will rest on the ability to manage the explosion in unstructured data.

"This is a nascent play for us but watch this space," he said. " The ability to deliver cradle-to-grave information management will happen over the coming years."