HP has announced changes to its executive leadership team, which the company hopes will accelerate its turnaround.
Bill Veghte, HP’s chief operating officer (COO), will become executive vice-president and GM of the HP Enterprise Group, a role that will now include responsibility for the coordinated development of the company’s portfolio of cloud solutions. Dave Donatelli will take on a new role focused on identifying early-stage technologies as he did successfully with 3PAR and 3Com.
In a separate organisational move, HP will combine its Marketing and Communications organisations under the leadership of chief communications officer Henry Gomez.
All of the changes are effective immediately.
Veghte brings a critical set of skills to the management of the HP Enterprise Group. Veghte is a proven technology executive with a wide range of experiences leading sales, services, marketing and engineering at scale. During his tenure at HP, he has run HP Software, held the responsibility of chief strategy officer and, over the last 15 months, served as HP’s COO.
As COO, Veghte helped create HP’s blueprint for the future, and he deeply understands the strategic challenges and opportunities facing both the company and its customers. He understands how HP operates and how to create comprehensive solutions that help HP’s customers capitalise on the enormous shift toward the “New Style of IT”.
As hardware becomes more standardised, leadership solutions are increasingly differentiated by the software layer that drives the hardware. This is true for both traditional IT and cloud environments.
Veghte’s experiences in software and in the enterprise, combined with HP’s infrastructure leadership, will help HP accelerate innovation in converged infrastructure, cloud and the emerging area of software-defined data centres.
Veghte will retain his current responsibility for the pan-HP cloud initiative. Since the HP Enterprise Group provides the foundational infrastructure for all of HP’s cloud offerings, the alignment of these two portfolios under a single leader will improve time to market for HP’s Converged Cloud solutions.
“Bill’s vision for the future of IT, his breadth of experience in the industry and at HP, and his deep enterprise experience, make him the ideal candidate to help HP navigate a rapidly changing market,” says Meg Whitman, HP president and CEO.
“Dave succeeded in pioneering converged infrastructure, bridging servers, storage and networking. Looking forward, the software-defined data centre and cloud computing offers us a great opportunity to extend HP’s leadership in the technology infrastructure space.”
Donatelli’s new role will focus on identifying early-stage companies with new technologies, similar to HP Moonshot and HP StoreOnce, which he brought to market. This will help HP develop future server, storage and networking solutions.
As part of this effort, he will work with select venture capital firms to explore targeted companies in their pipelines. HP will announce more specific details about this effort at a later date. Donatelli will continue to report to Whitman.
Henry Gomez will assume the additional responsibility of chief marketing officer (CMO). The company’s current CMO, Marty Homlish, will become HP’s chief customer experience officer, a new role that will focus on driving more consistent and high-value interactions with customers across all business units.