December 15, 2003
By Jeffrey Burt, and Paula Musich
Hewlett-Packard Co.'s decision to fold its services and enterprise systems into a single unit is being met with a mixture of enthusiasm and skepticism.
Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina announced the move to combine one of HP's stronger departments—services—with its embattled hardware groups at a meeting with financial analysts in New York last week. The new unit will be called the Technology Solutions Group and will encompass services, software and hardware servers, and storage devices.
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The merger of the groups won't change what HP is selling, only how the products are sold, said Kevin Francis, president and CEO of IT outsourcer CenterBeam Inc., which uses HP blade servers. "HP is moving to a customer-centric organization focused on delivering the best possible value to its customers, and that is completely aligned with CenterBeam's 'customer-first' philosophy," said Francis, in Santa Clara, Calif.
