Las Vegas – Almost exactly eight months since HP first announced it would be splitting into two companies, executives say the progress is 80 per cent complete.
According to John Hinshaw, executive vice president of technology and operations at HP, separating the company’s IT infrastructure into two has moved at an “aggressive” pace and is on track to completion by August 1.
This would give the HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise three months to operate as separate entities before the split is finalized November 1.
“We want to be sure that we fully tested the environment for three months before we separate,” Hinshaw said onstage during the HP Discover general session. “This will be one of the largest separations ever; we have at any given time 5,000 IT people working on this. It’s no small feat.”
To illustrate the task involved, HP cited several statistics in what needs to be separated. This included 2,800 applications, 300,000 employees, 75,000 application interfaces and their network connectivity, 570 projects and 50,000 servers.
Hinshaw said that he hoped HP could provide an example for any companies undergoing similar corporate changes, and that a key step is to consolidate IT infrastructure.
“All of you here today will probably at some point go through a merger, an acquisition or the latest trend seems to be to split into multiple companies,” he said. “As you go through that it’s interesting to look at your IT infrastructure and what that means. We’re documenting everything we’re doing throughout this process so we can share that with all of you who may go through the same process down the road.”