HP Milestones: A Look Back, As Tech Giant Splits In Two
HP has officially split into two companies. The breakup marks perhaps the biggest milestone in the company's storied history. Here's a look back at the corporate hits and misses that brought the company to where it is today.
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Hewlett Packard Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are marking their first week as two separate companies after the Nov. 1 split, a year in the making, became effective on Sunday.
The divorce comes at a time when traditional tech giants such as HP, Dell, and others are facing new competition from companies that were born in the cloud, or mostly born in the cloud, including Google, Salesforce.com, and Amazon. While HP has finalized its split-into-two strategy, Dell is taking a different tack, acquiring EMC and betting that the supply-chain economies of scale will pay off significantly. Nobody knows for sure which bet will pay off, or even if either one will.
HP Inc. is the new PC and printer business led by Dion Weisler, president and CEO. HP Enterprise (HPE), headed by president and CEO Meg Whitman, is the $53 billion back-end infrastructure business, which includes the company's cloud efforts, security, big data, infrastructure, and workplace productivity.
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"The winners in today's market will be those who apply the power of technology to fuel the power of ideas, and the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise is built to accelerate this journey for customers," said HPE CEO Meg Whitman in a prepared statement. "Hewlett Packard Enterprise has the vision, financial resources, and flexibility to help customers win while generating growth and long-term value for our shareholders."
Financial analyst firm Bernstein Research said in a report issued Tuesday that HPE is an on-premises vendor in an increasingly off-premises world. The analyst firm said that in spite of promises from management, it's unclear if HPE can deliver revenue growth going forward, particularly in the near term. That's because its largest business -- services -- is currently undergoing a restructuring to improve margins, and its second largest business – x86 servers – is in a market that is slowing down.
HPE has work ahead to build revenues, increase market share, and find new relevance in an era in which IT dollars are shifting to the cloud, especially since it has effectively unplugged its own public cloud efforts.
"The IT spending landscape is undergoing massive changes, chief among them is the migration from on-premises infrastructure to off-premises solutions," Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi wrote in one of the Bernstein reports today. "Increasingly, CIOs are telling us that their priority for workloads is SaaS, IaaS, then -- at last resort -- on premises. This transition is affecting all traditional IT vendors, whose growth rates have stagnated -- think IBM, EMC ex-VMware, NetApp, Cisco, Oracle ... and HPE. By contrast, SaaS and IaaS companies such as AWS, Google, CRM, and Workday are booming."
In the wake of HP's split into two companies this week -- perhaps the biggest milestone in the company's history -- we thought it was worth taking a look back at some other significant milestones for HP through the years.
Join us for this walk down memory lane, then tell us in the comments section below which HP corporate moves throughout the years you find most notable. And let us know how you expect the two companies to fare in the wake of the split.
Hewlett-Packard was founded by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard on Jan. 1, 1939. Like some other famous technology giants in Silicon Valley, it got its start in a garage.
The company went public in 1957.
The company's first acquisition was the F.L. Moseley Company in 1958, which moved HP into the plotter business -- the predecessor of today's printer business.
HP acquired this workstation maker for $476 million. The deal made HP the largest provider of computer workstations at the time.
Platt was the last HP CEO to be promoted to the position from within the company. He worked his way up the ranks and presided over 20% growth for part of his tenure. He spearheaded the spinoff of HP's $7 billion-plus test-and-measurement division Agilent. He also discontinued HP's own RISC chip manufacturing business in favor of partnering with Intel on the Itanium chip.
Fiorina, currently campaigning for a spot in the 2016 US presidential elections, came to HP from Lucent, a spinoff of AT&T. Fiorina began her career at AT&T in 1980 as a management trainee.
This deal, announced in September 2001, was HP's biggest at $25 billion.
Fiorina presided over the layoffs of 30,000 people during her tenure, which ended in February 2005 when she was ousted by the board. "While I regret the board and I have differences about how to execute HP's strategy, I respect their decision," Fiorina said in a statement released by the company. Even back then the chief executive had considered splitting the company.
Hurd replaced Fiorina on April 1, 2005, joining the company from the top job at NCR, where he'd worked his way up the ranks.
HP acquired Mercury Interactive for $4.5 billion in 2006, doubling the size of its software business.
HP acquired this IT consulting and services giant for $13.9 billion in 2008. HP took an $8 billion write down on the acquisition in 2012.
HP acquired this networking company for $2.7 billion. The deal shored up HP's networking lineup as the tech giant sought to offer complete hardware stacks of computer, networking, and storage to enterprise customers.
HP acquired Palm and its webOS mobile platform for $1.2 billion. The deal came at a time when Apple's iPhone sales were skyrocketing, and the mobile device market as a whole was experiencing exponential growth.
Hurd left HP following a scandal stemming from his behavior with a woman who was an HP contractor. A company investigation found no harassment, but did find that Hurd had violated the company's business standards by submitting false expense reports.
As Apotheker was falling out of favor at HP, news of HP's planned acquisition of software analytics company Autonomy surfaced, along with new talk about plans to spin off the PC business.
One month after the Autonomy rumors surfaced, and not even a year into Apotheker's tenure, HP's board fired Apotheker and replaced him with former eBay chief and HP board member Meg Whitman.
HP completed the deal to buy Autonomy for close to $12 billion, a price considered well over the value of the company. The deal spurred a shareholder lawsuit, which HP settled for $100 million and an $8.8 billion financial write down at HP.
HP announced a year ago its plan to split into two companies in November 2015.
In this deal worth $3 billion, HP noted that it would combine Aruba's wireless mobile solutions with HP's switching portfolio.
HP announced that it would eliminate up to 30,000 more jobs as it prepared for its Nov. 1 split.
The tech giant founded by Hewlett and Packard is split into two companies -- an enterprise company and a PC and printer company.
The tech giant founded by Hewlett and Packard is split into two companies -- an enterprise company and a PC and printer company.
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