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HP Plans To Cut Product Lines; Company Turnaround In 2016
dcblogs writes "Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman told financial analysts today that it will take until 2016 to turn the company around. Surprisingly, Whitman put some of the blame for the company's woes on its IT systems, which she said have hurt its internal operations. To fix its IT problems, Whitman said the company is adopting Salesforce and HR system Workday. The company also plans to cut product lines. It said it makes 2,100 different laser printers alone; it wants to reduce that by half. 'In every business we're going to benefit from focusing on a smaller number of offerings that we can invest in and really make matter,' said Whitman."
0_o 2100 laser printers? WHY?
...than the entire state of California.
They need a short term one, specifically one that doesn't involve switching CEOs every year.
If you don't have stability at the top, you have zero ability to execute a long term goal.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Wasn't their bold plan for not sucking supposed to be offering 'enterprise' IT consulting? And now they admit that their own organization couldn't change its own asses toner cartridge with both hands and a map?
When a company starts thinking that Salesforce (or any CRM, or any single piece of software) is going to save them, that means they are DOOMED.
The fact that HP doesn't know this says a lot about how clueless they really are about IT, software, *and* business needs in general.
If you are looking for a job, HP is a company without an interesting mobile strategy and a cloud strategy focused predominantly on IT services - not very attractive for entrepreneurial types, who have many other excellent opportunities.
Finally, the 100K HP departees are not likely to purchase HP products or to recommend them in their new settings. That's a very large pool of people who are going to advocate for competing products.
So the turnaround projected for 2016 is unlikely to happen, but it's a pretty fair bet than Meg Whitman won't be around HP when that day arrives.
Its been said, but I'll reiterate.
Salesforce is not an IT tool, it is a Customer Management tool. The whole point of using Salesforce is to make your sales and customer service people more efficient so you can do more with what you have or do the same with fewer people.
Workday is the same thing, only it replaces any internal HR databases with its own SaaS solution in order to allow your HR people to manage more people, or in order to manage the same number of people with fewer HR people.
At the end of the day, both of these projects are about outsourcing internal functions, possibly to save money, possibly because Dave Duffield and Marc Benioff the CEOs of Workday and Salesforce respectively were big contributors to Meg's failed gubernatorial campaign.
I'm cynical, especially when it comes to the continued flushing of HP down the toilet.
I have no idea how this has been voted up. The statements in this post are pure fantasy. First off, on what planet to people keep their PCs for 10 years? It's more like 3... at the most; for both home and business. And on the business side you're much better off sticking with a vendor like HP both for their warranties and the ease of deploying their OEM images over the network.
Secondly, white boxes are all fine and dandy for large data centers but you're leaving out a pretty big section of the pie there. "The cloud" isn't the blanket solution for everything yet. Virtually all small and medium sized offices run internal windows domains, most still find reasons to need exchange, have internal MDM software, and alot of industries still require older server/client software. Im also seeing more of a desire to have high availability systems which is creating demand for SAN storage.
Computers aren't dead, "the cloud" (aka. web services) is nothing new, and tablets don't replace anything.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.