As expected, HP has announced plans to divide into two companies. One will be called HP Inc, and it’ll be a PC and printer company that creates devices fro the consumer market. It’ll also keep the HP logo.
The other company will be called Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and it’ll focus on providing hardware, software, and services to corporate customers.
HP’s been considering such a move for at least a few years. Now it hopes to complete the separation by the end of 2015.
So what do the two companies actually plan to do? Pretty much what they’ve already done as a single company. But each company will have a different leadership team and won’t have to worry about competing for the company’s resources.
HP Inc will continue to offer consumer devices such as notebooks, tablets, desktops, and printers. The company also plans to make “investments in growth markets” such as 3D printing.
HP has been working on 3D printer technology for a while, but the company hasn’t launched a product yet… and keeps putting off any official announcements about such a device.
Meanwhile Hewlett-Packard Enterprise will focus on software, services, and enterprise hardware. That includes HP’s server product family, OneView infrastructure management system, and Helion cloud services platform.
It’s too early to say whether the split will result in better products for either consumer or enterprise markets. But HP is certainly hoping that two companies will be more profitable than one… or at least that if one fails, the other can still succeed. Profit margins for consumer devices have been shrinking in recent years thanks to falling prices of laptops, tablets, and other computers. There’s still a lot of money to be made in the enterprise market though, where IT professionals are accustomed to paying higher prices for quality and/or support.
The state of HP: sad.