HP taps former Dell India executive to scale up new enterprise unit
Garde has joined the company as vice-president and general manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise India
Bengaluru: Hewlett-Packard Co. has hired former Dell Inc. executive Sameer Garde to help scale up business in the recently carved-out business unit, Hewlett Packard Enterprise India Pvt. Ltd (HPEI), and also as a possible successor to incumbent country managing director Neelam Dhawan.
Garde has joined the company as vice-president and general manager at HPEI, marking the second big change at the Indian operations of the erstwhile Hewlett-Packard, which in September tasked company executive Rajiv Srivastava as head at Hewlett Packard India sales, which includes personal computer and printer sales.
The 76-year-old US-based company was split into two last month. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) oversees the corporate hardware and services business, while the company’s personal computer and printer business comes under HP Inc.
Neelam Dhawan, who took over as country head of HP in 2008, is expected to move to a leadership role at Hewlett Packard’s corporate office in Palo Alto, according to an executive familiar with the development.
“For now, Sameer is working along with Neelam Dhawan and in the coming months will take over the role from her," the executive said, requesting anonymity. “Dhawan will then move to a senior role at the parent company."
An HPE spokeswoman confirmed Garde’s appointment, but declined to share details.
Prior to joining HPEI, Garde was president, South Asia, at Philips India, and worked for more than a decade at Dell, before becoming managing director and president at Dell India in 2012.
Hewlett-Packard Co. decided to split its personal computer and printer businesses from its services operations and corporate hardware as the management reasoned that operations with different growth profiles are best managed as separate entities.
After the global restructuring, the 250,000-strong HPE business with revenue of $57.6 billion is overseen by chief executive officer Meg Whitman. Dion Weisler is the chief executive at HP Inc., which employs more than 50,000 employees and generated $57.3 billion last year.
The two companies do not declare revenue that they generate from India.
In the past year, many technology firms have followed a similar approach, with some like eBay selling its Internet-telephone provider Skype and spinning off its PayPal unit, while others like International Business Machines Corp. and Dell Inc. are focusing on software and services business and cutting their dependence on commoditized hardware business.
However, many say the biggest challenge ahead for Garde at HPE India—and also for its parent—will be to get business from both large and small businesses, as many of them look at cloud computing services offered by the likes of Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc.
Worryingly for Hewlett-Packard Co., the company does not have anything to offer in the fast-growing cloud computing area after the company put an end to its plans of building a competitor to Amazon’s AWS cloud service.
HPE is also in the midst of appointing a new leader for its technology outsourcing business, which along with the software business, brings about $24 billion in revenues.
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