Blog: Claudia Imhoff

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What a Day For News!

HP and IBM made big headlines today for very different reasons. In his first major move at HP's helm, Mark Hurd announced plans to remove 14,500 employees -- roughly a tenth of HP's workforce.

Not to be outdone, IBM announced major reshuffling in its executive ranks with the retirement of Janet Perna, long time head of IBM's information management solutions, and the departure of John Joyce, head of the company's Global Services consulting arm.

For HP's Mark Hurd, this move should seem familiar to Hurd followers. He had a very similar strategy when he was the head of NCR where he cut jobs. The good news -- the move is expected to save nearly $2 billion annually, starting in 2007. No chump change there. However, Hurd repeatedly refused to answer analysts' questions to provide more details -- in particular, which areas of HP would be hit hardest and what would be the effect of this massive layoff on the morale of his remaining troops. It seems obvious though that motivating employees after such a drastic event will be difficult and many questions will have to be answered.

For IBM, Joyce will be replaced by not one, not two, but three newly promoted senior VPs. Big shoes to fill, huh? IGS is being divided into IT services, enterprise business services (I assume BI consulting will fall there), and integrated operations. Joyce, meanwhile, goes on to head up venture capitalist, Silver Lake Partners.

Janet Perna is retiring after 31 years at IBM. She is well-respected by IBM partners and customers alike as a no-nonsense leader in driving the company's information integration strategy. I wish her well in her retirement.

Her replacement is Ambuj Goyal, formerly the Lotus general manager. What this means to the product side of IBM's house remains to be seen but given Goyal's role within IBM for developing collaboration tools, we may see a shift in emphasis to workflow, portals and other collaboration technologies.

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