HP's CEO MARK HURD ……HE WANTS IT ALL !

Toner News Mobile Forums Latest Industry News HP's CEO MARK HURD ……HE WANTS IT ALL !

Date: Monday May 3, 2010 12:24:45 pm
Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)
  • Author
    Posts

  • Anonymous
    Inactive
    http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0412/technology-hp-mark-hurd-ibm-cisco.html?partner=contextstory
    HP’s CEO MARK HURD ……HE WANTS IT
    ALL !!!

    The
    plan to win the battle of the tech titans.

    Hewlett-Packard
    Chief Executive Mark Hurd likes things big and simple. His boardroom
    has a big empty table and a big videoconferencing screen. A large tablet
    of blank paper leans on a tripod, allowing him to sketch big numbers to
    seal a point. The room’s sole decoration is an outsize cylinder
    bursting apart with springs. Its label reads, “big can of whup ass.”
    Hurd
    has done his share of whuppin’ since he took over HP in April 2005. The
    company had pulled in $80 billion of revenue for the Oct. 31, 2004
    fiscal year, a figure scarcely changed over the four years since the
    merger with Compaq Computer. For fiscal 2009 the take was $115 billion,
    or annualized growth of 7% over the last five years. Net income during
    that period has been up an average 18% per annum to $7.7 billion and
    jolted ahead 25% in the first fiscal quarter of 2010. All this is thanks
    to dramatic cost-cutting, the standardization of large-scale purchases
    like semiconductors–and a brutalizing culture of accountability for
    every penny in and out.

    HP’s chief has also imposed a ruthless
    efficiency at the highest levels. By packing the board and senior
    management with more Midwesterners than Silicon Valley insiders, and
    adding a lot more hard-core business types than engineers and inventors,
    he has remade HP more in his own image–people who thrive on
    dissatisfaction and thirst for expansion. You see it reflected in the
    August 2008 $13.9 billion acquisition of Electronic Data Systems and the recent $2.7 billion grab of 3Com , the Chinese networking company, and in the relentless push to
    grab new large customers. “Growth comes about two-thirds from M&A,
    25% organic”–that is, winning business from rivals–“and 10% from a big
    new idea,” says Hurd, 53. “We are now $20 billion bigger than IBM, in a
    $1.7 trillion market for technology. For us it breaks into enterprise,
    SMB [small and medium businesses] and consumer.” But for all that, 70
    cents of every HP revenue dollar comes from 2,000 big companies.

    Size
    matters in this business. With the explosion of computer networks and
    data, customers–willing to shell out for multiyear contracts of tens of
    millions of dollars and more–need a vendor that can manage many
    aspects of many businesses and help them find efficiencies within and
    among them. Clients don’t want to deal with a dozen different
    salespeople from as many different companies every time they upgrade
    equipment or introduce a new app. The new titans of the one-stop world
    include Oracle, which recently added to its database empire the remains
    of Sun Microsystems, maker of computer servers;
    IBM, the longtime consulting, software and mainframe powerhouse; Cisco
    Systems , now with servers built into its
    network, and alliances with data storage giant EMC and virtualization
    software maker VMWare.

    Hurd intends to grab as much of that
    action as he can. Last year he spent a lot of time calling on customers
    and prospects, meeting with roughly 3,000 chief information officers
    worldwide (mainly through roundtables) and is on track to exceed that
    number this year. It means selling a lot more than the low-margin
    personal computers and printers that make up most of the HP brand, more
    than the cheap outsourcing and maintenance deals the company moved into
    before Hurd arrived. Since then he has pushed into so-called
    industry-standard computers–machines built with off-the-shelf commodity
    chips–and bought companies in markets related to HP’s core hardware
    and service businesses. In January it announced a $250 million
    investment with Microsoft  to develop and market
    hardware, software and services for cloud computing, a way of getting
    at supercomputing power through an Internet browser. Putting on a new
    face, HP is spending $40 million on “Let’s Do Amazing,” a rebranding ad
    campaign. Hurd, in other words, is taking direct aim at IBM and Cisco,
    whose consulting and networking businesses are among the last
    high-margin sells in the cutthroat world of tech.

Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.