HP Retools Services

Vendor's goal: Ease customer interaction

By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee

ewlett-Packard is moving to reorganize and strengthen its IT services organization. The company is expected to announce this week that Bob Walker, its longtime CIO, is joining its software and services group as general manager and VP for professional services. He will report to software and services VP Ann Livermore. Mike Rose, an HP veteran who was most recently controller for an HP unit, will become CIO.

Walker feels his past experience will help HP work with other CIOs tackling IT infrastructure design and deployment decisions. "This is a great opportunity to take the lessons I 've learned as CIO and move to a role of more direct help in providing services and outsourcing to our external customers," he explains.

Walker's appointment is part of an ongoing revamping of HP's professional service organization. HP's aim is to streamline the process of interacting with its top 6,000 or so customers. In the past, HP users had to work with different salespeople for different products and services. Now, HP's largest customers will have one representative for building and deploying end-to-end enterprise solutions, says Ron Tarver, HP's worldwide services program manager.

HP also announced an IT service management reference model that will provide a framework for the delivery of services and software, says Tarver. HP's internal IT organization helped create the model. "We worked closely with our own internal IT people in the development of this reference model for the delivery of services for our customers," says Walker.

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