2 More top Hp Executives Jump Ship

[Anonymous]

2 More top Hp Executives Jump Ship

HP Exec Alan Kessler Leaves for CEO Role at Vormetric
Vormetric, a player in the business of enterprise-grade encryption and key management, said today that it had named Alan Kessler, a former VP at tech giant Hewlett-Packard and a veteran of several tech companies including Palm and 3Com, as its new CEO.

Kessler’s most recent title at HP was VP of worldwide sales and service for enterprise security products, where he was responsible for running its security portfolio, including ArcSight, TippingPoint and Fortify.

Kessler’s resume includes a stint as the president and COO of Palm back in the late 1990s when it was still a subsidiary of 3Com. (Both Palm and 3Com eventually ended up being acquired, though separately, by HP.) While at Palm, he took primary responsibility for the software business and oversaw the growth of its community of software developers, which went from 25,000 to north of 100,000. He first joined 3Com in 1985.

After 3Com, he ran two storage companies, Intransa and Attune Systems, before landing at TippingPoint, a security company 3Com had acquired in 2004. TippingPoint was one of the primary assets that attracted the interest of HP when it spent $2.7 billion to acquire 3Com in 2009.

Here’s Vormetric’s original announcement.

Enterprise Encryption Leader Taps Proven Business Leader and Security Industry Veteran to Further Accelerate Growth in Domestic and Global Markets

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Nov. 13, 2012 –Vormetric, Inc., the leader in enterprise encryption and key management today announced the appointment of IT startup and public company veteran Alan Kessler as the company’s new President and CEO and member of its Board of Directors. Mr. Kessler will lead Vormetric’s expansion into new markets and extend the company’s leadership position within the data security sector. He joins Vormetric from HP where he was VP, Worldwide Sales and Service for Enterprise Security Products responsible for the success of customers and partners on a global basis.

“Vormetric is firmly established as the enterprise encryption leader, just as the market for data security is taking off. The company has a great team in place and significant opportunities for growth in both our domestic market as well as new untapped geographies,” said Alan Kessler. “It’s a great time to join Vormetric. My goal is to grow the company into a front runner within the data security segment. We will address new high growth use cases including the cloud and big data, expand our share of the federal government space and target key international markets.”

According to findings presented by Gartner, Inc. at the recent Symposium/ITxpoSecurity conference the already large security market is expected to grow by 56% from current levels within five years, while cloud security will almost triple. Vormetric provides strong, easily manageable data security for large organizations in the financial services, government, healthcare and energy sectors including Honeywell, LG, Michelin, Nicor, Prudential, and more. To date, 16 of the Fortune 25 companies have standardized on Vormetric for their data encryption and key management needs.

“Our objective was to recruit a CEO who has leadership experience in the security, enterprise software and storage systems markets, as well as a person with a track record for building and managing global businesses,” said Bob Spinnner, Vormetric Board Member and Managing Director at Sigma Partners. “Alan Kessler meets and exceeds all those criteria. We are extremely pleased that he is onboard and know Alan has the acumen to grow Vormetric in both domestic and international markets.”

Mr. Kessler has more than 20 years of management experience with both entrepreneurial startups and very large technology vendors. Most recently with HP, he set and executed the go-to-market strategy for the full portfolio of products, solutions and associated security services from the Enterprise Security Products business unit. He was responsible for leading the teams that took the award-winning HP ArcSight, HP TippingPoint, HP Fortify, HP Application Security Center and HP Atalla security products to market.

He also served as president of intrusion prevention vendor TippingPoint (a division of 3Com) until it was folded into HP as part of the 3Com acquisition. He led the TippingPoint business through a stage of unprecedented market growth steadily increasing market share at a rate of four times the industry average. Previously, Mr. Kessler was president and CEO of Attune Systems, an enterprise storage systems company. He has also served as the president of Palm Inc. and as president of Palm’s Platform and Products group during Palm’s successful IPO.

Mr. Kessler holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley – Walter A. Haas School of Business, and a B.S. in Business from San Jose State University.

http://adage.com/article/news/eric-keshin-hewlett-packard/238309/
Eric Keshin Out at Hewlett-Packard

Eric Keshin, head of marketing for Hewlett-Packard’s combined personal computers and printing division, is no longer with the company, Ad Age has learned.

 

                    Eric Keshin                 

             It was a short run; Mr. Keshin spent just 20 months at HP after a nearly three-decade career at Interpublic Group of Cos.’ McCann. The timing of his departure coincidentally comes just as McCann has ousted its CEO Nick Brien, the person under whom Mr. Keshin was reorganized out of the agency. Joining HP was a natural fit given it was one of McCann clients and a marketer he knew well.

A corporate spokesman said via email that Mr. Keshin "left HP to pursue other interests," and added that the company is now "undertaking a formal search for a leader of Printing and Personal Systems Marketing." Mr. Keshin could not be reached for comment, but marketing industry executives suggested he does not have another position lined up.

HP has been an internal hotbed of turnover and change over the past few years. As Fortune summed up in a piece in May about the tenure of former CEO Leo Apotheker: "For a decade now the company has sometimes seemed more like a tawdry reality show than one of the world’s great enterprises."

Meg Whitman took the helm in September of last year, becoming the fourth CEO in less than a decade, succeeding three ousted previous leaders. They were: Mr. Apotheker (removed after less than a year on the job from November 2010 to September 2011); Mark Hurd (resigned after a personal scandal after serving from 2005-2010) and Carly Fiorina (left in 2005 after a board scuffle that included founding heir Walter Hewlett). It’s been a flurry of change that followed a period of relative calm and continuity; before Ms. Fiorina, there had been only three CEOs since the company was founded in 1939.

In March, Ms. Whitman combined the personal systems group and the printing group into a single unit, and it was at that time Mr. Keshin was tapped to head marketing of the combined group. He reported directly to CMO Marty Homlish (Todd Bradley, who had been heading the personal systems group, was named to head the new combined group, Printing and Personal Systems, as well.) In a memo that was published by AllThingsD, The former print standalone division marketing chief, Manny Kostas, was noted would "work together" with Mr. Keshin, the memo stated, but Mr. Kostas later left HP in August.

During his short tenure, Mr. Keshin did use his agency-side experience to rejigger the company’s marketing relationships. Earlier this year, he oversaw a creative review, and at the end of that process the work went to Omnicom Group’s BBDO.

But whether can marketing can answer HP’s significant business problems remains to be seen. Its stock price hit a 52-week low this week amid a competitive PC industry climate, less-than-stellar reviews for the latest operating system Windows 8, the ongoing drop-off in printing, and the continued movement of consumer interest to tablets and smartphones. HP did launch a tablet, the TouchPad in summer 2011 based on its own WebOS operating system, only to pull back less than two months later, discontinuing the device and warning that the company was considering spinning off the personal computing division.

Ms. Whitman’s takeover as CEO reversed that course, and reinstated HP’s tablet ambitions, although the first one, the ElitePad 900 run on Windows 8, will not arrive until early 2013 and is positioned as a business tablet. Even Ms. Whitman acknowledges the company has a long way to go and recently told analysts the company would not be back on course until 2016.

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November 15, 2012 at 9:14 AM