Hewlett-Packard Names Software Chief Veghte as Strategy Officer
January 19, 2012, 3:33 PM ESTBy Aaron Ricadela
Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Hewlett-Packard Co. promoted its top software executive, Bill Veghte, to chief strategy officer as Meg Whitman continues to rebuild management four months into her tenure as head of the world’s largest computer maker.
Veghte, hired almost two years ago to lead the $3.2 billion software business, will now shape Hewlett-Packard’s technology strategy and manage cloud computing efforts, the Palo Alto, California-based company said in a statement today. Veghte, 44, will also keep his job as executive vice president of software.
“From mainframes to client/server to the Internet, companies that identified the opportunity first and developed the right strategy came out on top,” Whitman, Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive officer, said in the statement. “Bill has the knowledge and vision to keep us there.”
Hewlett-Packard has paid increasing attention to software -- revenue rose almost 18 percent last year -- as the company seeks to improve sales growth and profit after a lackluster fiscal 2011 that led to the ouster of CEO Leo Apotheker Sept. 22.
Whitman, who took the reins the same day, has been assembling her team after spending the beginning of her tenure making operational decisions. She named longtime adviser Henry Gomez chief communications officer on Jan. 10.
She scrapped a proposal on Oct. 27 to spin off the company’s personal-computer unit, and on Dec. 9 said it would release its WebOS operating system as an open-source project. As chief strategy officer, Veghte will also oversee the WebOS work.
Veghte joined Hewlett-Packard in May 2010 after almost 20 years at Microsoft Corp., where he worked on operating systems, including Windows 7, Windows Server 2003 and Windows 98.
Apotheker in June elevated Vegthe and two other executives to report to him.
--Editors: Romaine Bostick, Jeffrey Tannenbaum
To contact the reporters on this story: Aaron Ricadela in San Francisco at aricadela@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
