Ms Meg Whitman, the recently appointed President and CEO of the world's largest technology company, HP, in her first address to her customers said she will fall back upon the company's core strengths to drive its growth.
“Í am a big believer that when you think about a company you have to start with your strengths. What you do better than anyone else and then build on those strengths to expand into other markets and other areas. And our core, the heritage of this company what we do better than anyone else is our infrastructure, our servers, our storage, our networking, our printers, our imaging as well as our PCs,'' Ms Whitkar told over 5,000 delegates at HP Discover 2011, the company's annual technology showcase event for business and government customers.
Ms Whitman pointed out that HP was not a software company nor are “we ...in the software business to transform HP into a software company. We are in the software business to solve your most challenging problems. We can manage all kinds of different environments.''
Key markets
The $129-billion HP considers India and other BRIC nations, including Brazil, Russia and China, as a key market for its growth and it is also one of its fastest growing markets in the world. Revenues from BRIC countries increased 9 per cent which amounted to 12 per cent of total HP revenues during 2010.
Ms Whitman who took over HP's top post from Mr Léo Apotheker just over nine weeks ago, pointed out that the core businesses of the company contribute about 70 per cent of its revenues. She said HP will use its global scale to expand that core and “build everything else we do around what's an area of great strength for Hewlett Packard”. She also said that she wanted to “put the HP drama out of the headlines” which probably refers to an earlier decision of the company to spin off its PC business which was later reversed.
leadership changes
Ms Whitman who was earlier the CEO of ebay, said frequent leadership changes particularly, “CEO frustration, was hard for both the employees and the partners.''
“I think over the last year we confused some people over who we are as a company.'' She said that HP will bring to its customers “the products and services that delight and inspire you and get back to delivering the breakthrough innovation and technology that this company is known for 70 years”.
She said that the company needs to become one team so that the customer is not confused whom to turn to for assistance in times of need.
Earlier, HP's Senior Vice-President for Enterprise Business, Mr Jan Zadak, told reporters that BRIC countries provided the freedom for HP of leveraging new technologies and “bring innovation faster to the market” as these countries had fewer legacy issues compared with developed nations. “We are very, very focused on growing markets,” Mr Zadak said.