The company announced the products at an event in Cupertino, California, where executives said HP had a broad portfolio across PCs, servers, networking, storage and printing, but one that can sometimes be overwhelming to SMBs.

Small businesses are beginning to emerge from the global economic downturn, but that recovery will not be steady, said Chad Thompson, an analyst at Access Market International Partners in New York, who spoke at HP's event.

"This is not a nice, linear curve moving out of the recession," Thompson said. Especially for SMBs, future conditions can be hard to predict, he said.

And like enterprises, small IT departments now have to do more with less, because many small companies have had to cut a single IT staffer to half-time or eliminate dedicated technology staff completely, Thompson said.

As a result, HP aims to help its SMB customers manage their infrastructure, using simpler products as well as some new help tools.

Though HP's offerings are broad, on Wednesday the company focused mostly on networking and storage, both areas where investment is expected to rise over the next few years. While SMB technology spending overall will grow at a rate of 3.6 percent per year until 2014, spending on LAN hubs and switches will grow by 29 percent per year and network-attached storage by 30 percent, AMI's Thompson said. Fibre Channel SANs (storage area networks) and server-attached storage also will grow at several times the overall pace, Thompson said.

HP updated its V family of LAN gear for SMBs by introducing the HP V1410 Switch Series, a more energy-efficient evolution of the V1400 that offers more configuration choices and use options. The V1410 is available in fixed-configuration designs with eight, 16 or 24 ports of 10/100/1000M bps (bits per second). No 16-port version was available for the V1400.