Blog: Claudia Imhoff

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HP hires NCR's Top Dog!

Boy -- I take a short vacation and miss out on all the excitement! Hewlett-Packard selected NCR Corporation's CEO to replace ousted Carly Fiorina. (see my blog from February 9, 2005). Big shoes to fill indeed -- and an interesting choice, I might say.

Mark Hurd came up through the ranks of Teradata -- ultimately serving as their COO and President. He became NCR's CEO in March 2003. Under his leadership, NCR saw a turnaround of their declining revenues (last quarter saw their net income rise 55 % and sales rise 9% to $1.79 Billion) but it seems like going from NCR to HP is a mightly big leap for him. The two companies are quite different in size (HP's annual revenues are about $80 Billion!) and HP has had a very high profile CEO who, despite what the naysayers may think of her, did keep HP in the news.

Apparently, Mr. Hurd really wanted the job . For the past 7 weeks, he has campaigned for the it (who knew?)and read everything in the public domain he could about the company. He is bringing his background in Business Intelligence as well. He has already gotten Board chairwoman Patty Dunn and CFO Bob Wayman talking about the need for metrics associated with the 'winning' strategy. Dunn said. "Mark is very much a fan of performance metrics, and we like the establishment of logical performance metrics to monitor that success..." Good for him!

I read a sample of several people's opinions about Mr. Hurd and found that most had never heard of him. I guess he is a much more familiar name to those of us in the BI area. Here are some comments from Ian Foster's blog and other sources:

Rob Enderle says Hurd is a good choice saying that this selection is a "staying the course strategy from HP". He expects Hurd to focus on management basics and will not cause any major disruptions. Sounds to me like Mr. Enderle thinks Hurd will continue with Fiorina's directions.

Naomi Moneypenny states that it was "an interesting choice and how very different from Carly Fiorina." She wondered if Hurd can come up with a new strategy -- She says in her blog: "... I'm worried that HP is really trying to go to the same 'strategyspace' as IBM. That's a good way to destroy value. Think about HP's collaborative culture... HP is not adept at monolothic operations, never has been. Its history is in product innovation. The question is how can you continue to be known for innovation when you operate across many product lines." Hopefully Mr. Hurd can bring some of his magic at NCR with him to HP.

All this aside, what does it mean for NCR and Teradata? I guess that remains to be seen but it must be a blow to those who were so happy with Mr. Hurd at the helm there. I know he was highly regarded, a great promotor of Teradata and Business Intelligence in general, and will be sorely missed.

Yours in BI success,

Claudia

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