At a meeting with financial analysts yesterday, Hewlett-Packard Chairman and CEO Mark Hurd and members of the company’s executive management team outlined a restructuring plan — including a reduction in headcount of more than 24,000 employees — following its recent $13.9 billion acquisition of IT services provider EDS.
Since the deal was announced in May, concerns have swirled around the planned merger of EDS with HP’s outsourcing business, specifically regarding how quickly the new entity can get up and running and whether the marriage still leaves gaps in HP’s consulting and application integration services.
“We’ll be a bigger, stronger company by the time we get EDS integrated into the portfolio of capabilities that HP has,” Hurd said in opening his prepared remarks.
“We need to get our cost structure in line in order to be more competitive,” said Cathie Lesjak, executive vice president and CFO, adding, “it will take us some time to get EDS growth to a market rate.”