Now that there’s a new boss at HP — one who’s staffing up — I’m adding a new image: A paratrooper. After all, despite the fact that HP’s new CEO Meg Whitman is getting things at HP calmed down, there’s still some more drama to come. Anyone taking a new executive job is — by a stretch of phrase — “parachuting in.” Get it? And the parachute picture won’t apply just to HP, either — it also works for posts about other companies that are working through their own dramas. (Cisco Systems, I’m looking at you!)

Anyhow, the paratrooper image also works when you hear where the new guy comes from: Boeing. HP named John Hinshaw, the former vice president and general manager of Boeing Information Solutions, as its new executive vice president of Global Technology and Business Processes.

Hinshaw — who is, by my count, Whitman’s first senior hire since taking over as CEO last month — is 41, and will oversee HP’s information technology and administrative services. He’ll be in charge of procuring service and making sure all the business processes are running as smoothly and efficiently as they should be. It’s a big job, and as such, Hinshaw will be a member of HP’s executive council and report directly to Whitman.

In his previous position, Hinshaw was responsible for running Boeing’s high-growth businesses, which included delivering IT solutions to the U.S. government. Before that, he was Boeing’s CIO responsible for global IT strategy, operations, process and people. Before that, he was senior vice president and CIO at Verizon Wireless. And before that, he was a consultant at Accenture.

In the same announcement, HP also said that Craig Flower has been promoted to senior vice president and CIO. He’s been with HP since 1984 (so no paratrooper for him), and will report to Hinshaw. He’ll oversee data management, applications, global business intelligence and a bunch of other stuff. He’s held a wide range of IT positions within HP, including its e-business operations, customer and sales groups, and the all-important Personal Systems Group. If there’s a guy who knows what’s what at HP, it seems Flower would be it.

Update: As the commenter below just reminded me, Flower is taking the title held by former CIO Randy Mott, who left in HP’s big summer shakeup.

The General Services Administration–which oversees government procurement–will soon become the first major federal office to move to cloud-based email and calendar apps on an agency-wide basis. And it’s chosen Google Apps to do it.

A hard-won victory for Google, which beat out Microsoft for the $6.7 million five-year contract, leaving the folks up in Redmond more than a little peeved to see Office’s ubiquity in government threatened in this way.

“We are disappointed in the GSA’s internal e-mail decision,” the company said in a post to its “Why Microsoft” blog, adding that it is nonetheless “gratified that so many federal, state & local governments have chosen Microsoft to meet their business needs.”

You can almost hear the gritting teeth, can’t you? The horror of 15,000 GSA employees all using Gmail….

So again, a coup for Google, which has been working hard to push its cloud computing suite of messaging and collaboration apps to the government.

Interestingly, sources close to the negotiations tell me that the RFP (Request for Proposal) for the GSA contract was amended midway through the process to allow for offshoring of government data outside the United states–as an accommodation for Google.

Which is odd, because you’d think that if the United States government is embracing cloud computing, it would prefer the clouds in which its data is stored to be within its own borders. That Google requested and was granted the option to store GSA data offshore isn’t necessarily troubling (it must meet GSA security requirements regardless), but it is…interesting.

Google wouldn’t tell me the reason for its request, although I’ve heard it may have something to do with how the company segregates data and apps geographically. It was, however, quick to insist that it isn’t planning to offshore any U.S. government data entrusted to it–at least, currently.

Said spokesman Andrew Kovacs, “The government’s starting with Gmail and Calendar, and their data will be stored in a segregated system located in the continental United States that is exclusively for our government customers.”