Hewlett Packard Enterprise surprised a lot of people yesterday with a massive deal to spin off its Enterprise Services business unit and merge it with IT services firm Computer Sciences Corp.
Meg Whitman’s five-year plan to fix Hewlett-Packard by breaking it up cost a lot of jobs
It was big nasty job, and lots of eggs got broken along the way.
Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images
The two companies revealed a lot of impressive figures: The new outfit will boast annual revenue of about $26 billion and will have 5,000 clients in 70 countries. After the spinoff, HPE will have about $32 billion in annual revenue.
But there’s one metric that neither company talked about yesterday: The number of jobs that will be affected. No cuts were announced, but you can bet there will be some before the combination is complete.
On CNBC today, CEO Meg Whitman said that, after the spinoff, HPE will have somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 people. Separately, a spokesman told Recode that about 100,000 jobs will move from HPE to the new CSC-led company.
The number of announced jobs cut on Whitman’s watch add up to more than 85,000, about 25 percent of the total number of employees at HP when she began, about 350,000 worldwide.
And while she will be remembered for fixing deeply-seated problems at one of America’s most storied Silicon Valley icons by essentially breaking it into three more valuable pieces, it’s only fair to note the pain caused by job losses along the way.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
See More:
